Demographic changes, such as the ageing of society and the decline of the birth rate, are gradually leading to the loss of valuable knowledge and experience in the Dutch Labour market. This necessitates an explicit focus on workers' sustainable employment so that they can add value to the organisation throughout their career. This study looks into the way in which the workers' motivation might affect their investments into their own sustainable employment. It was conducted in a major industrial service provider, Sitech Services. The conclusion is that intrinsic motivation plays an important role in both younger and older employees, and that the younger workers undertake more action in order to give physical form to their sustainable employment than their older colleagues.
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In the Southern part of Norway, many secondary school pupils drop out due to lack of motivation. Our project aims to enhance pupils’ desire to learn and to complete their education. Here, we investigate possible change in motivation after implementation of an intervention. We specifically focus on pupils’ motivation for their subject, in this study: Norwegian. Meta-cognitive abilities and self-regulated learning have a positive effect on motivation. Therefore, we developed a five-step intervention to strengthen pupils’ self-regulated learning and meta-cognitive abilities. In the intervention, pupils define a) what prevents them from being motivated for learning and b) how they can overcome possible obstacles hindering their learning. Additionally, they discuss this with their peers and formulate their own learning approach to the subject at hand, thus strengthening their sense of autonomy and relatedness. Pupils’ motivation was measured at three time points across the school year (N=101, T1; N=76, T2; N=105, T3). MANOVA revealed that, over the course of the year, pupils became less intrinsically and more extrinsically motivated towards their subject, thus contradicting our expectations and previous findings. Although we aimed to target pupils’ intrinsic motivation, the implementation of our study may also have reduced pupils’ sense of autonomy, thus strengthening their external motivation and moving away from more student-centered learning.
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To find, design and create solutions to global challenges, 21st century engineering professionals work in multi-disciplinary and international teams that are expected to work effectively, efficiently and innovatively. Universities are following this trend, as they acknowledge the importance of soft skills for employability. The integration of soft skills in higher education curricula is not straightforward, especially in engineering education. At our university, soft skills courses score low in student satisfaction surveys. This is the reason why we study the motivation, attitude and anxiety of computer engineering students toward learning soft skills. To do so, we performed a quantitative study using an online survey based on the mini-AMBT. Overall, our data indicate that computer engineering students have a positive motivation and attitude toward learning soft skills from both an integrative and an instrumental perspective. The obtained results do not give clear insights as to what causes the low satisfaction scores for soft skill courses. All of the above calls for further, qualitative research. We studied the motivation and attitude of computer engineering students in a Dutch university of applied sciences; the motivation and attitude of students in other disciplines and countries may differ and should be studied separately. Full text for members of IEEE : https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8363231/
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Increasing students’ motivation in higher education by designing a specific curriculum has always been a challenging but very complex process. The Department of Business, Finance and Marketing (BFM) of The Hague University of Applied Sciences (THUAS) initiated a redesign of the curricula with the major goals of increasing flexibility of learning opportunities and offering students a more motivating, inspiring and richer diversity of learning experiences. In the literature of learning in higher education this has often been labeled as ‘offering extracurricular learning opportunities’. The redesign of the curriculum implies that the new one will result in an enhancement of the flexibility of the curriculum, by offering learning opportunities beyond the borders of specific programs like marketing, finance or entrepreneurship and retail management. The richness and diversity should create flexible platforms, offering students the possibility to enrich their career choices to design their own personalised career path, hopefully maximizing the possibilities for their talent development. However, very little is known about the relationship between the students’ satisfaction with extracurricular learning opportunities, aiming at the personalisation of students’ career choices, and their motivation. In this chapter we describe our research into this relationship between student motivation and learning environments. Designing a network curriculum by increasing the possibility of extracurricular learning opportunities in higher education could have a positive impact on students’ motivation when it is combined with activities to increase goal students’ commitment. This depends on teachers’ qualities to communicate the valence and instrumentality of the learning possibilities offered for the prospective work environment. This is a complex issue however. Teachers from different educational programs, even in the same domain, have a different orientation on existing learning opportunities within one specific program. Excellent coaching skills by tutors are important. These coaching skills are necessary to support students in the process of envisioning extracurricular learning opportunities when important career choices have to be made.
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Abstract Introduction: The factors influencing patients' motivation for undergoing electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) have not yet been subjected to a thorough study. Knowledge of these factors could improve the quality of care for patients with depression recommended to have ECT. Aim: To identify the factors that influence the motivation of patients diagnosed with depression to have ECT. Method: This qualitative study followed a grounded theory approach in which semistructured interviews were conducted with 18 patients from four different psychiatric hospitals to study their perspectives on factors influencing their motivation to have ECT. Results: The explanatory framework of factors influencing motivation for ECT comprises four main categories, starting with the most important category, psychological pain and distress, and continuing with the following categories: perceived need for treatment; perception of ECT as an effective treatment; environmental influences. Discussion: In this study, we found that the psychological pain and distress of depression, and their consequences in daily life, had been the primary experiences that motivated patients to start and continue ECT. Implications for Practice: This is the first study that has examined motivational factors for patients with severe depression to participate in ECT. Professionals appear to have a key role in motivating patients for ECT. They should explore factors that influence motivation for ECT, regularly assess their motivation and intervene on influential factors
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Previous work on tourists' positive and negative affect has mainly used cross-sectional data. Consequently, little is known about how motivations are related to tourists' emotions over an extended period of time. The purpose of this study was to understand the impact of travel motivation on tourists' emotions and whether the impact would remain the same across different time points. The sample consisted of a panel of approximately 2000 leisure travelers in the Netherlands. After eliminating missing data, 412 panelists completed all seven questionnaires over the nine months of the study. The results indicated that motivation does not have a significant impact on tourists' emotions over a relatively long period of time. Specifically, the study found that travel motivations or a cluster of travel motivations do not seem to have significant within-subject or between-subject impacts on tourists' emotions over a nine-month period. The findings demonstrate the complex relationships between tourists’ travel motivation and emotions and highlight the importance of a longitudinal approach to studying emotions in the tourism context. Managerial implications for destination marketers are discussed.
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Deploying Learning Analytics that significantly improve learning outcomes remains a challenge. Motivation has been found to be related to academic achievement and is argued to play an essential role in efficient learning. We developed a Learning Analytics dashboard and designed an intervention that relies on goal orientation and social comparison. Subjects can see a prediction of their final grade in a course as well as how they perform in comparison to classmates with similar goal grades. Those with access to the dashboard ended up more motivated than those without access, outperformed their peers as the course progressed and achieved higher final grades. Our results indicate that learner-oriented dashboards are technically feasible and may have tangible benefits for learners.
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Abstract The main purpose of this intervention was to measure student’s motivation in English Literature before and after an intervention based Zoltán Dörnyei’s Motivational Self System (2009) and Michael Magid’s (2011) application of the same theory in schools in Singapore. The present intervention was adapted to the students of the Dutch secondary school CLV (Christian Lyceum Veenendaal) in Veenendaal using fragments of English Literature (books, films, poems and songs). The intervention was carried out during eight lessons of fifty minutes where students had to participate in a variety of activities, all registered in a workbook assigned to each student at the beginning of the research project. Prior to and after the intervention, students filled in a questionnaire on motivation and English Literature. The results of these questionnaires were analysed with SPSS running descriptive statistical analysis. Along with these analyses, the timelines and life trees made by the students during the lessons and students’ answers given to the exercises on the workbooks were evaluated and compared. One of the most important conclusions of the intervention was that female students were more motivated, could make action plans and set goals easier and more detailed than male students. Another important result was that students in general had no interest in English Literature, although they realised it can be influential in their future life. The affective attitude of students to- wards the teacher and materials increased after the intervention, as well as students’ confidence in their own effort during class. However, the construct validity between the quantitative and qualitative data could not be established due to the fact that gender was not included as variable in the questionnaire. Gender relevancy became visible after the analyses of the workbooks. Therefore, future research will have to focus on including gender as a variable in the questionnaire in order to establish solid relations between quantitative and qualitative data. Another interesting research question for future interventions could be how to adapt English Literature and the materials that are being used in a way that both female and male students can tap into their own intrinsic motivational current.
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A promising contribution of Learning Analytics is the presentation of a learner's own learning behaviour and achievements via dashboards, often in comparison to peers, with the goal of improving self-regulated learning. However, there is a lack of empirical evidence on the impact of these dashboards and few designs are informed by theory. Many dashboard designs struggle to translate awareness of learning processes into actual self-regulated learning. In this study we investigate a Learning Analytics dashboard based on existing evidence on social comparison to support motivation, metacognition and academic achievement. Motivation plays a key role in whether learners will engage in self-regulated learning in the first place. Social comparison can be a significant driver in increasing motivation. We performed two randomised controlled interventions in different higher-education courses, one of which took place online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Students were shown their current and predicted performance in a course alongside that of peers with similar goal grades. The sample of peers was selected in a way to elicit slight upward comparison. We found that the dashboard successfully promotes extrinsic motivation and leads to higher academic achievement, indicating an effect of dashboard exposure on learning behaviour, despite an absence of effects on metacognition. These results provide evidence that carefully designed social comparison, rooted in theory and empirical evidence, can be used to boost motivation and performance. Our dashboard is a successful example of how social comparison can be implemented in Learning Analytics Dashboards.
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Unhealthy eating behaviors and low levels of physical activity are major problems in adolescents and young adults in vocational education. To develop effective intervention programs, more research is needed to understand how different types of motivation contribute to health behaviors. In the present study, Self-Determination Theory is used to examine how motivation contributes to dietary and physical activity behaviors in vocational students. This cross-sectional study included 809 students (mean age 17.8 ± 1.9 years) attending vocational education in the Netherlands. Linear multilevel regression analyses were used to investigate the association between types of motivation and dietary and physical activity behaviors. Amotivation was negatively associated with breakfast frequency and positively associated with diet soda consumption and high-calorie between-meal snacks. A positive association was found between autonomous motivation and water intake, breakfast frequency, fruit intake, and moderate-to-vigorous physical activity. Autonomous motivation was negatively associated with the consumption of unhealthy products. Controlled motivation was not associated with physical activity or dietary behaviors. Different types of motivation seem to explain either healthy or unhealthy dietary behaviors in vocational students. Autonomous motivation, in particular, was shown to be associated with healthy behaviors and could therefore be a valuable intervention target.
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