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punishments than usual (for example, isolating a student for extended times). In case you are tempted in this
direction, remember that every IEP also guarantees the student and the student’s parents due process before an
IEP can be changed. In practice this means consulting with everyone involved in the case—especially parents, other
specialists, and the student himself—and reaching an agreement before adopting new strategies that differ
significantly from the past.
Instead of “increasing the volume” of punishments, a better approach is to keep careful records of the student’s
behavior and of your own responses to it, documenting the reasonableness of your rules or responses to any major
disruptions. By having the records, collaboration with parents and other professionals can be more productive and
fair-minded, and increase others’ confidence in your judgments about what the student needs in order to fit in more
comfortably with the class. In the long term, more effective collaboration leads both to better support and to more
learning for the student (as well as to better support for you as teacher!).
Physical disabilities and sensory impairments
A few students have serious physical, medical, or sensory challenges that interfere with their learning. Usually,
the physical and medical challenges are medical conditions or diseases that require ongoing medical care. The
sensory challenges are usually a loss either in hearing or in vision, or more rarely in both. Whatever the specific
problem, it is serious enough to interfere with activities in regular classroom programs and to qualify the student
for special educational services or programs.
Physical challenges that are this serious are relatively infrequent compared to some of the other special needs
discussed in this chapter, though they are of course important in the lives of the students and their families, as well
as important for teachers to accommodate. Only about one per cent of US students have a hearing loss serious
enough to be served by special programs for such students (United States Department of Education, 2005). Only
about half that number have visual impairments that lead them to be served by special programs. For two reasons,
though, these figures are a bit misleading. One reason is that many more students have vision or hearing problems
that are too mild (such as wearing eyeglasses for “ordinary” nearsightedness). Another is that some students with
serious sensory impairments may also have other disabilities and therefore not be counted in statistics about
sensory impairments.
Hearing loss
A child can acquire a hearing loss for a variety of reasons, ranging from disease early in childhood, to difficulties
during childbirth, to reactions to toxic drugs. In the classroom, however, the cause of the loss is virtually irrelevant
because it makes little difference in how to accommodate a student’s educational needs. More important than the
cause of the loss is its extent. Students with only mild or moderate loss of hearing are sometimes called hearing
impaired or hard of hearing; only those with nearly complete loss are called deaf. As with other sorts of
disabilities, the milder the hearing loss, the more likely you are to encounter the student in a regular classroom, at
least for part of the day.
Signs of hearing loss
Although determining whether a student has a hearing loss may seem straightforward (“Just give a hearing
test!”), the assessment is often not clear cut if it takes the student’s daily experiences into account. A serious or
profound hearing loss tends to be noticed relatively quickly and therefore often receive special help (or at least
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5. Students with special educational needs
receives additional diagnosis) sooner. Mild or moderate hearing loss is much more common, however, and is more
likely to be overlooked or mistaken for some other sort of learning problem (Sherer, 2004). Students with a mild
hearing loss sometimes have somewhat depressed (or lowered) language and literacy skills—though not always, and
in any case so do some students without any loss. They may also seem not to listen or attend to a speaker because of
trouble in locating the source of sounds—but then again, sometimes students without loss also fail to listen, though
for entirely different reasons. Students with hearing loss may frequently give incorrect answers to questions—but so
do certain other students with normal hearing. In addition, partial hearing loss can be hidden if the student teaches
himself or herself to lip read, for example, or is careful in choosing which questions to answer in a class discussion.
And so on. Systematic hearing tests given by medical or hearing specialists can resolve some of these ambiguities.
But even they can give a misleading impression, since students’ true ability to manage in class depends on how well
they combine cues and information from the entire context of classroom life.
In identifying a student who may have a hearing loss, therefore, teachers need to observe the student over an
extended period of time and in as many situations as possible. In particular, look for a persistent combination of
some of the following, but look for them over repeated or numerous occasions (Luckner & Carter, 2001):
• delayed language or literacy skills, both written and oral
• some ability (usually partial) to read lips
• less worldly knowledge than usual because of lack of involvement with oral dialogue and/or delayed literacy
• occasionally, tendency to social isolation because of awkwardness in communication
Teaching students with hearing loss
In principle, adjustments in teaching students with hearing loss are relatively easy to make though they do
require deliberate actions or choices by the teacher and by fellow students. Interestingly, many of the strategies
make good advice for teaching all students!
• Take advantage of the student’s residual hearing. Seat the student close to you if you are doing the talking,
or close to key classmates if the students are in a work group. Keep competing noise, such as unnecessary
talking or whispering, to a minimum (because such noise is especially distracting to someone with a
hearing loss). Keep instructions concise and to-the-point. Ask the student occasionally whether he or she is
understanding.
• Use visual cues liberally. Make charts and diagrams wherever appropriate to illustrate what you are saying.
Look directly at the student when you are speaking to him or her (to facilitate lip reading). Gesture and
point to key words or objects—but within reason, not excessively. Provide handouts or readings to review
visually the points that you make orally.
• Include the student in the community of the classroom. Recruit one or more classmates to assist in
“translating” oral comments that the student may have missed. If the student uses American Sign Language
(ASL) at home or elsewhere, then learn a few basic, important signs of ASL yourself (“Hello” “thank you”
“How are you?”). Teach them to classmates as well.
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Visual impairment
Students with visual impairments have difficulty seeing even with corrective lenses. Most commonly the
difficulty has to do with refraction (the ability to focus), but some students may also experience a limited field of
view (called tunnel vision) or be overly sensitive to light in general. As with hearing loss, labels for visual
impairment depend somewhat on the extent and nature of the problem. Legal blindness means that the person has
significant tunnel vision or else visual acuity (sharpness of vision) of 20/200 or less, which means that he or she
must be 20 feet away from an object that a person with normal eyesight can see at 200 feet. Low vision means that
a person has some vision usable for reading, but often needs a special optical device such as a magnifying lens for
doing so. As with hearing loss, the milder the impairment, the more likely that a student with a vision problem will
spend some or even all the time in a regular class.
Signs of visual impairment
Students with visual impairments often show some of the same signs as students with simple, common
nearsightedness. The students may rub their eyes a lot, for example, blink more than usual, or hold books very close
to read them. They may complain of itchiness in their eyes, or of headaches, dizziness, or even nausea after doing a
lot of close eye work. The difference between the students with visual impairment and those with “ordinary”
nearsightedness is primarily a matter of degree: the ones with impairment show the signs more often and more
obviously. If the impairment is serious enough or has roots in certain physical conditions or disease, they may also
have additional symptoms, such as crossed eyes or swollen eyelids. As with hearing loss, the milder forms ironically
can be the most subtle to observe and therefore the most prone to being overlooked at first. For classroom teachers,
the best strategy may be to keep track of a student whose physical signs happen in combination with learning
difficulties, and for whom the combination persists for many weeks.
Teaching students with visual impairment
In general, advice for teaching students with mild or moderate visual impairment parallels the advice for
teaching students with hearing loss, though with obvious differences because of the nature of the students’
disabilities.
• Take advantage of the student’s residual vision. If the student still has some useful vision, place him or her
where he can easily see the most important parts of the classroom—whether that is you, the chalkboard, a
video screen, or particular fellow students. Make sure that the classroom, or at least the student’s part of it,
is well lit (because good lighting makes reading easier with low vision). Make sure that handouts, books and
other reading materials have good, sharp contrast (also helpful with a visual impairment).
• Use non-visual information liberally. Remember not to expect a student with visual impairment to learn
information that is by nature only visual, such as the layout of the classroom, the appearance of
photographs in a textbook or of story lines in a video. Explain these to the student somehow. Use hands-on
materials wherever they will work, such as maps printed in three-dimensional relief or with different
textures. If the student knows how to read Braille (an alphabet for the blind using patterns of small bumps
on a page), allow him to do so.
• Include the student in the community of the classroom. Make sure that the student is accepted as well as
possible into the social life of the class. Recruit classmates to help explain visual material when necessary.
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5. Students with special educational needs
Learn a bit of basic Braille and encourage classmates to do the same, even if none of you ever become as
skilled with it as the student himself or herself.
The value of including students with special needs
I have hinted at it already in this chapter, but it is worth saying again: including students with disabilities in
regular classrooms is valuable for everyone concerned. The students with disabilities themselves tend to experience
a richer educational environment, both socially and academically. Just as with racial segregation, separate
education is not equal education, or at least cannot be counted on to be equal. But classmates of students with
disabilities also experience a richer educational environment; they potentially meet a wider range of classmates and
to see a wider range of educational purposes in operation. Teachers also experience these benefits, but their
programs often benefit in other ways as well. The most notable additional benefit is that many teaching strategies
that are good for students with disabilities also turn out to benefit all students—benefits like careful planning of
objectives, attention to individual differences among students, and establishment of a positive social atmosphere in
the classroom. Later (in Chapters 9 and 10) we will return to these topics because of their importance for high-
quality teaching. But at that point we will frame the topics around the needs of all students, whatever their
individual qualities.
Chapter summary
Since the 1970s support for people with disabilities has grown significantly, as reflected in the United States by
three key pieces of legislation: the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, and the
Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). The support has led to new educational practices, including
alternative assessments for students with disabilities, placement in the least restrictive environment, and individual
educational plans.
There are many ways of classifying people with disabilities, all of which carry risks of stereotyping and
oversimplifying individuals’ strengths and needs. For the purposes of education, the most frequent category is
learning disabilities, which are difficulties with specific aspects of academic work. The high prevalence of learning
disabilities makes this category especially ambiguous as a description of particular students. Assistance for students
with learning disabilities can be framed in terms of behaviorist reinforcement, metacognitive strategies, or
constructivist mentoring.
Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a problem in sustaining attention and controlling impulses.
It can often be controlled with medications, but usually it is also important for teachers to provide a structured
environment for the student as well.
Intellectual disabilities (or mental retardation) are general limitations in cognitive functioning as well as in the
tasks of daily living. Contemporary experts tend to classify individuals with these disabilities according to the
amount and frequency of support they need from others. Teachers can assist these students by giving more time
and practice than usual, by including adaptive and functional skills in what they teach, and by making sure that the
student is included in the daily life of the classroom.
Behavioral disorders are conditions in which students chronically perform highly inappropriate behaviors.
Students with these problems present challenges for classroom management, which teachers can meet by
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identifying circumstances that trigger inappropriate behaviors, by teaching interpersonal skills explicitly, and by
making sure that punishments or disciplinary actions are fair and have been previously agreed upon.
Physical and sensory disabilities are significant limitations in health, hearing, or vision. The signs both of
hearing loss and of vision loss can be subtle, but can sometimes be observed over a period of time. Teaching
students with either a hearing loss or a vision loss primarily involves making use of the students’ residual sensory
abilities and insuring that the student is included in and supported by the class as well as possible.
Key terms Least restrictive environment (LRE)
Learning disabilities
Alternative assessment Mental retardation
Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 Portfolio assessment
Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) Rehabilitation Act of 1973
Behavioral disorders Sensory impairment
Contingency contracts Transition planning
Hearing loss Visual impairment
Individuals with Disabilities Education Act
Individual educational plan (IEP)
Intellectual disabilities
On the Internet
Each of the following websites represents an organization focused on the needs of people with one particular
type of disability. Each includes free access to archives of non-current journals and other publications, as well as
information about conferences, professional training events, and political news relevant to persons with disabilities.
(Note that the sponsoring organizations about hearing loss and about intellectual disabilities changed their names
recently, though not their purposes, so their websites may eventually change names as well.)
<www.ldanatl.org> This is primarily about learning disabilities, but also somewhat about ADHD.
<www.add.org> This website is primarily about ADHD. Note that its website name uses an older terminology
for this disability, ADD (no “H”) for attention deficit disorder (with the term hyperactivity).
<www.shhh.org> This one primarily discusses about hearing loss.
<www.navh.org> This website is primarily about visual impairment.
<www.aamr.org> This one is primarily about intellectual disabilities or mental retardation.
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6. Student motivation
Not so long ago, a teacher named Barbara Fuller taught general science to elementary years
students, and one of her units was about insects and spiders. As part of the unit she had students
search for insects and spiders around their own homes or apartments. They brought the creatures to
school (safely in jars), answered a number of questions about them in their journals, and eventually
gave brief oral reports about their findings to the class. The assignment seemed straightforward, but
Barbara found that students responded to it in very different ways. Looking back, here is how
Barbara described their responses:
“I remember Jose couldn’t wait to get started, and couldn’t bear to end the assignment either! Every
day he brought more bugs or spiders—eventually 25 different kinds. Every day he drew pictures of
them in his journal and wrote copious notes about them. At the end he gave the best oral
presentation I’ve ever seen from a third-grader; he called it ‘They Have Us Outnumbered!’ I wish I
had filmed it, he was so poised and so enthusiastic.
“Then there was Lindsey—the one who was always wanted to be the best in everything, regardless of
whether it interested her. She started off the work rather slowly—just brought in a few bugs and only
one spider. But she kept an eye on what everyone else was bringing, and how much. When she saw
how much Jose was doing, though, she picked up her pace, like she was trying to match his level.
Except that instead of bringing a diversity of creatures as Jose was doing, she just brought more and
more of the same ones—almost twenty dead house flies, as I recall! Her presentation was OK—I
really could not give her a bad mark for it—but it wasn’t as creative or insightful as Jose’s. I think she
was more concerned about her mark than about the material.
“And there was Tobias—discouraging old Tobias. He did the work, but just barely. I noticed him
looking a lot at other students’ insect collections and at their journal entries. He wasn’t cheating, I
believe, just figuring out what the basic level of work was for the assignment—what he needed to do
simply to avoid failing it. He brought in fewer bugs than most others, though still a number that was
acceptable. He also wrote shorter answers in his journal and gave one of the shortest oral reports. It
was all acceptable, but not much more than that.
“And Zoey: she was quite a case! I never knew whether to laugh or cry about her. She didn’t exactly
resist doing the assignment, but she certainly liked to chat with other students. So she was easily
distracted, and that cut down on getting her work done, especially about her journal entries. What
really saved her—what kept her work at a reasonably high level of quality—were the two girls she
ended up chatting with. The other two were already pretty motivated to do a lot with the assignment
—create fine looking bug collections, write good journal entries, and make interesting oral
presentations. So when Zoey attempted chitchat with them, the conversations often ended up
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6. Student motivation
focusing on the assignment anyway! She had them to thank for keeping her mind on the work. I don’t
know what Zoey would have done without them.”
As Barbara Fuller’s recollections suggest, students assign various meanings and attitudes to academic activities
—personal meanings and attitudes that arouse and direct their energies in different ways. We call these and their
associated energizing and directing effects by the term motivation, or sometimes motivation to learn. As you
will see, differences in motivation are an important source of diversity in classrooms, comparable in importance to
differences in prior knowledge, ability, or developmental readiness. When it comes to school learning, furthermore,
students’ motivations take on special importance because students’ mere presence in class is (of course) no
guarantee that students really want to learn. It is only a sign that students live in a society requiring young people to
attend school. Since modern education is compulsory, teachers cannot take students’ motivation for granted, and
they have a responsibility to insure students’ motivation to learn. Somehow or other, teachers must persuade
students to want to do what students have to do anyway. This task—understanding and therefore influencing
students’ motivations to learn—is the focus of this chapter. Fortunately, as you will see, there are ways of
accomplishing this task that respect students’ choices, desires, and attitudes.
Like motivation itself, theories of it are full of diversity. For convenience in navigating through the diversity, we
have organized the chapter around six major theories or perspectives about motives and their sources. We call the
topics (1) motives as behavior change, (2) motives as goals, (3) motives as interests, (4) motives as attributions
about success, (5) motives as beliefs about self-efficacy, and (6) motives as self-determination. We end with a
perspective called expectancy-value theory which integrates ideas from some of the other six theories, and partly as
a result implies some additional suggestions for influencing students’ motivations to learn in positive ways.
Motives as behavior
Sometimes it is useful to think of motivation not as something “inside” a student driving the student’s behavior,
but as equivalent to the student’s outward behaviors. This is the perspective of behaviorism, which we discussed in
Chapter 1 (“Student learning”) as a way to think about the learning process. In its most thorough-going form,
behaviorism focuses almost completely on what can be directly seen or heard about a person’s behavior, and has
relatively few comments about what may lie behind (or “underneath” or “inside”) the behavior. When it comes to
motivation, this perspective means minimizing or even ignoring the distinction between the inner drive or energy of
students, and the outward behaviors that express the drive or energy. The two are considered the same, or nearly
so.
Equating the inner and the outward might seem to violate common sense. How can a student do something
without some sort of feeling or thought to make the action happen? As we will explain, this very question has led to
alternative models of motivation that are based on cognitive rather than behaviorist theories of learning. We will
explain some of these later in this chapter. Before getting to them, however, we encourage you to consider the
advantages of a behaviorist perspective on motivation.
Sometimes the circumstances of teaching limit teachers’ opportunities to distinguish between inner motivation
and outward behavior. Certainly teachers see plenty of student behaviors—signs of motivation of some sort. But the
multiple demands of teaching can limit the time needed to determine what the behaviors mean. If a student asks a
lot of questions during discussions, for example, is he or she curious about the material itself, or just wanting to
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look intelligent in front of classmates and the teacher? In a class with many students and a busy agenda, there may
not be a lot of time for a teacher to decide between these possibilities. In other cases, the problem may not be
limited time as much as communication difficulties with a student. Consider a student who is still learning English,
or who belongs to a cultural community that uses patterns of conversation that are unfamiliar to the teacher, or
who has a disability that limits the student’s general language skill. In these cases discerning the student’s inner
motivations may take more time and effort. It is important to invest the extra time and effort for such students, but
while a teacher is doing so, it is also important for her to guide and influence the students’ behavior in constructive
directions. That is where behaviorist approaches to motivation can help.
Operant conditioning as a way of motivating
The most common version of the behavioral perspective on motivation is the theory of operant conditioning
associated with B. F. Skinner (1938, 1957), which we discussed in Chapter 1 (“Learning process”). The description in
that chapter focused on behavioral learning, but the same operant model can be transformed into an account of
motivation. In the operant model, you may recall, a behavior being learned (the “operant”) increases in frequency
or likelihood because performing it makes a reinforcement available. To understand this model in terms of
motivation, think of the likelihood of response as the motivation and the reinforcement as the motivator. Imagine,
for example, that a student learns by operant conditioning to answer questions during class discussions: each time
the student answers a question (the operant), the teacher praises (reinforces) this behavior. In addition to thinking
of this situation as behavioral learning, however, you can also think of it in terms of motivation: the likelihood of
the student answering questions (the motivation) is increasing because of the teacher’s praise (the motivator).
Many concepts from operant conditioning, in fact, can be understood in motivational terms. Another one, for
example, is the concept of extinction, which we defined in Chapter 1 as the tendency for learned behaviors to
become less likely when reinforcement no longer occurs—a sort of “unlearning”, or at least a decrease in
performance of previously learned. The decrease in performance frequency can be thought of as a loss of
motivation, and removal of the reinforcement can be thought of as removal of the motivator. Table 14 summarizes
this way of reframing operant conditioning in terms of motivation, both for the concepts discussed in Chapter 1 and
for other additional concepts.
Table 14: Operant conditioning as learning and as motivation
Concept Definition phrased Definition phrased Classroom example
in terms of learning in terms of motivation
Operant Behavior that becomes Behavior that suggests Student listens to
more likely because of an increase in motivation teacher’s comments during
reinforcement lecture or discussion
Reinforcement Stimulus that increases Stimulus that motivates Teacher praises student
likelihood of a behavior for listening
Positive reinforcement Stimulus that increases Stimulus that motivates Teacher makes
likelihood of a behavior by by its presence; an encouraging remarks
being introduced or added “incentive” about student’s homework
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to a situation
Negative reinforcement Stimulus that increases Stimulus that motivates Teacher stops nagging
the likelihood of a behavior by its absence or student about late
by being removed or taken avoidance homework
away from a situation
Punishment Stimulus that Stimulus that Teacher deducts points
decreases the likelihood of decreases motivation by its for late homework
a behavior by being presence
introduced or added to a
situation
Extinction Removal of Removal of motivating Teacher stops
reinforcement for a stimulus that leads to commenting altogether
behavior decrease in motivation about student’s homework
Shaping successive Reinforcements for Stimuli that gradually Teacher praises student
approximations behaviors that gradually shift motivation toward a for returning homework a
resemble (approximate) a final goal motivation bit closer to the deadline;
final goal behavior gradually she praises for
actually being on time
Continuous Reinforcement that Motivator that occurs Teacher praises highly
reinforcement occurs each time that an
operant behavior occurs each time that a behavioral active student for every
sign of motivation occurs time he works for five
minutes without
interruption
Intermittent Reinforcement that Motivator that occurs Teacher praises highly
reinforcement sometimes occurs sometimes when a active student sometimes
following an operant behavioral sign of when he works without
behavior, but not on every motivation occurs, but not interruption, but not every
occasion on every occasion time
Cautions about behavioral perspectives on motivation
As we mentioned, behaviorist perspectives about motivation do reflect a classroom reality: that teachers
sometimes lack time and therefore must focus simply on students’ appropriate outward behavior. But there are
nonetheless cautions about adopting this view. An obvious one is the ambiguity of students’ specific behaviors;
what looks like a sign of one motive to the teacher may in fact be a sign of some other motive to the student
(DeGrandpre, 2000). If a student looks at the teacher intently while she is speaking, does it mean the student is
motivated to learn, or only that the student is daydreaming? If a student invariably looks away while the teacher is
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speaking, does it mean that the student is disrespectful of the teacher, or that student comes from a family or
cultural group where avoiding eye contact actually shows more respect for a speaker than direct eye contact?
Another concern about behaviorist perspectives, including operant conditioning, is that it leads teachers to
ignore students’ choices and preferences, and to “play God” by making choices on their behalf (Kohn, 1996).
According to this criticism, the distinction between “inner” motives and expressions of motives in outward behavior
does not disappear just because a teacher (or a psychological theory) chooses to treat a motive and the behavioral
expression of a motive as equivalent. Students usually do know what they want or desire, and their wants or desires
may not always correspond to what a teacher chooses to reinforce or ignore. This, in a new guise, is once again the
issue of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation that we discussed in Chapter 1. Approaches that are exclusively
behavioral, it is argued, are not sensitive enough to students’ intrinsic, self-sustaining motivations.
As we pointed out in Chapter 1, there is truth to this allegation if a teacher actually does rely on rewarding
behaviors that she alone has chosen, or even if she persists in reinforcing behaviors that students already find
motivating without external reinforcement. In those cases reinforcements can backfire: instead of serving as an
incentive to desired behavior, reinforcement can become a reminder of the teacher’s power and of students’ lack of
control over their own actions. A classic research study of intrinsic motivation illustrated the problem nicely. In the
study, researchers rewarded university students for two activities—solving puzzles and writing newspaper headlines
—that they already found interesting. Some of the students, however, were paid to do these activities, whereas
others were not. Under these conditions, the students who were paid were less likely to engage in the activities
following the experiment than were the students who were not paid, even though both groups had been equally
interested in the activities to begin with (Deci, 1971). The extrinsic reward of payment, it seemed, interfered with
the intrinsic reward of working the puzzles.
Later studies confirmed this effect in numerous situations, though they have also found certain conditions where
extrinsic rewards do not reduce intrinsic rewards. Extrinsic rewards are not as harmful, for example, if a person is
paid “by the hour” (i.e. by a flat rate) rather than piecemeal (by the number of items completed) (Cameron & Pierce,
1994; Eisenberger & Cameron, 1996). They also are less harmful if the task itself is relatively well-defined (like
working math problems or playing solitaire) and high-quality performance is expected at all times. So there are still
times and ways when externally determined reinforcements are useful and effective. In general, however, extrinsic
rewards do seem to undermine intrinsic motivation often enough that they need to be used selectively and
thoughtfully (Deci, Koestner, & Ryan, 2001). As it happens, help with being selective and thoughtful can be found in
the other, more cognitively oriented theories of motivation. These use the goals, interests, and beliefs of students as
ways of explaining differences in students’ motives and in how the motives affect engagement with school. We turn
to these cognitively oriented theories next, beginning with those focused on students’ goals.
Motives as goals
One way motives vary is by the kind of goals that students set for themselves, and by how the goals support
students’ academic achievement. As you might suspect, some goals encourage academic achievement more than
others, but even motives that do not concern academics explicitly tend to affect learning indirectly.
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Goals that contribute to achievement
What kinds of achievement goals do students hold? Imagine three individuals, Maria, Sara, and Lindsay, who
are taking algebra together. Maria’s main concern is to learn the material as well as possible because she finds it
interesting and because she believes it will be useful to her in later courses, perhaps at university. Hers is a mastery
goal because she wants primarily to learn or master the material. Sara, however, is concerned less about algebra
than about getting top marks on the exams and in the course. Hers is a performance goal because she is focused
primarily on looking successful; learning algebra is merely a vehicle for performing well in the eyes of peers and
teachers. Lindsay, for her part, is primarily concerned about avoiding a poor or failing mark. Hers is a performance-
avoidance goal or failure-avoidance goal because she is not really as concerned about learning algebra, as Maria is,
or about competitive success, as Sara is; she is simply intending to avoid failure.
As you might imagine, mastery, performance, and performance-avoidance goals often are not experienced in
pure form, but in combinations. If you play the clarinet in the school band, you might want to improve your
technique simply because you enjoy playing as well as possible—essentially a mastery orientation. But you might
also want to look talented in the eyes of classmates—a performance orientation. Another part of what you may wish,
at least privately, is to avoid looking like a complete failure at playing the clarinet. One of these motives may
predominate over the others, but they all may be present.
Mastery goals tend to be associated with enjoyment of learning the material at hand, and in this sense represent
an outcome that teachers often seek for students. By definition therefore they are a form of intrinsic motivation. As
such mastery goals have been found to be better than performance goals at sustaining students’ interest in a
subject. In one review of research about learning goals, for example, students with primarily mastery orientations
toward a course they were taking not only tended to express greater interest in the course, but also continued to
express interest well beyond the official end of the course, and to enroll in further courses in the same subject
(Harackiewicz, et al., 2002; Wolters, 2004).
Performance goals, on the other hand, imply extrinsic motivation, and tend to show the mixed effects of this
orientation. A positive effect is that students with a performance orientation do tend to get higher grades than those
who express primarily a mastery orientation. The advantage in grades occurs both in the short term (with
individual assignments) and in the long term (with overall grade point average when graduating). But there is
evidence that performance oriented students do not actually learn material as deeply or permanently as students
who are more mastery oriented (Midgley, Kaplan, & Middleton, 2001). A possible reason is that measures of
performance—such as test scores—often reward relatively shallow memorization of information and therefore guide
performance-oriented students away from processing the information thoughtfully or deeply. Another possible
reason is that a performance orientation, by focusing on gaining recognition as the best among peers, encourages
competition among peers. Giving and receiving help from classmates is thus not in the self-interest of a
performance-oriented student, and the resulting isolation limits the student’s learning.
Goals that affect achievement indirectly
Failure-avoidant goals
As we mentioned, failure-avoidant goals by nature undermine academic achievement. Often they are a negative
byproduct of the competitiveness of performance goals (Urdan, 2004). If a teacher (and sometimes also fellow
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students) put too much emphasis on being the best in the class, and if interest in learning the material as such
therefore suffers, then some students may decide that success is beyond their reach or may not be desirable in any
case. The alternative—simply avoiding failure—may seem wiser as well as more feasible. Once a student adopts this
attitude, he or she may underachieve more or less deliberately, doing only the minimum work necessary to avoid
looking foolish or to avoid serious conflict with the teacher. Avoiding failure in this way is an example of self-
handicapping—deliberate actions and choices that the reduce chances of success. Students may self-handicap in a
number of ways; in addition to not working hard, they may procrastinate about completing assignments, for
example, or set goals that are unrealistically high.
Social goals
Most students need and value relationships, both with classmates and with teachers, and often (though not
always) they get a good deal of positive support from the relationships. But the effects of social relationships are
complex, and at times can work both for and against academic achievement. If a relationship with the teacher is
important and reasonably positive, then the student is likely to try pleasing the teacher by working hard on
assignments (Dowson & McInerney, 2003). Note, though, that this effect is closer to performance than mastery; the
student is primarily concerned about looking good to someone else. If, on the other hand, a student is especially
concerned about relationships with peers, the effects on achievement depend on the student’s motives for the
relationship, as well as on peers’ attitudes. Desiring to be close to peers personally may lead a student to ask for
help from, and give help to peers—a behavior that may support higher achievement, at least up to a point. But
desiring to impress peers with skills and knowledge may lead to the opposite: as we already mentioned, the
competitive edge of such a performance orientation may keep the student from collaborating, and in this indirect
way reduce a student’s opportunities to learn. The abilities and achievement motivation of peers themselves can
also make a difference, but once again the effects vary depending on the context. Low achievement and motivation
by peers affects an individual’s academic motivation more in elementary school than in high school, more in
learning mathematics than learning to read, and more if their is a wide range of abilities in a classroom than if
there is a more narrow range (Burke & Sass, 2006).
In spite of these complexities, social relationships are valued so highly by most students that teachers should
generally facilitate them, though also keep an eye on their nature and their consequent effects on achievement. As
we explain further, many assignments can be accomplished productively in groups, for example, as long as the
groups are formed thoughtfully; in that chapter we discuss some ways of insuring that such groups are successful,
such as by choosing group tasks wisely and recognizing all members’ contributions are fully as possible.
Relationships can also be supported with activities that involve students or adults from another class or from
outside the school, as often happens with school or community service projects. These can provide considerable
social satisfaction and can sometimes be connected to current curriculum needs (Butin, 2005). But the majority of
students’ social contacts are likely always to come from students’ own initiatives with each other in simply taking
time to talk and interact. The teacher’s job is to encourage these informal contacts, especially when they happen at
times that support rather than interfere with learning.
Encouraging mastery goals
Even though a degree of performance orientation may be inevitable in school because of the mere presence of
classmates, it does not have to take over students’ academic motivation completely. Teachers can encourage
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mastery goals in various ways, and should in fact do so because a mastery orientation leads to more sustained,
thoughtful learning, at least in classrooms, where classmates may sometimes debate and disagree with each other
(Darnon, Butera, & Harackiewicz, 2006).
How can teachers do so? One way is to allow students to choose specific tasks or assignments for themselves,
where possible, because their choices are more likely than usual to reflect prior personal interests, and hence be
motivated more intrinsically than usual. The limitation of this strategy, of course, is that students may not see some
of the connections between their prior interests and the curriculum topics at hand. In that case it also helps for the
teacher to look for and point out the relevance of current topics or skills to students’ personal interests and goals.
Suppose, for example, that a student enjoys the latest styles of music. This interest may actually have connections
with a wide range of school curriculum, such as:
• biology (because of the physiology of the ear and of hearing)
• physics or general science (because of the nature of musical acoustics)
• history (because of changes in musical styles over time)
• English (because of relationships of musical lyrics and themes with literary themes)
• foreign languages (because of comparisons of music and songs among cultures)
Still another way to encourage mastery orientation is to focus on students’ individual effort and improvement as
much as possible, rather than on comparing students’ successes to each other. You can encourage this orientation
by giving students detailed feedback about how they can improve performance, or by arranging for students to
collaborate on specific tasks and projects rather than to compete about them, and in general by showing your own
enthusiasm for the subject at hand.
Motives as interests
In addition to holding different kinds of goals—with consequent differences in academic motivation—students
show obvious differences in levels of interest in the topics and tasks of the classroom. Suppose that two high school
classmates, Frank and Jason, both are taking chemistry, and specifically learning how to balance chemical
equations. Frank finds the material boring and has to force himself to study it; as a result he spends only the time
needed to learn the basic material and to complete the assignments at a basic level. Jason, on the other hand,
enjoys the challenges of balancing chemical equations. He thinks of the task as an intriguing puzzle; he not only
solves each of them, but also compares the problems to each other as he goes through them.
Frank’s learning is based on effort compared to Jason’s, whose learning is based more fully on interest. As the
example implies, when students learn from interest they tend to devote more attention to the topic than if they
learn from effort (Hidi & Renninger, 2006). The finding is not surprising since interest is another aspect of
intrinsic motivation—energy or drive that comes from within. A distinction between effort and interest is often
artificial, however, because the two motives often get blended or combined in students’ personal experiences. Most
of us can remember times when we worked at a skill that we enjoyed and found interesting, but that also required
effort to learn. The challenge for teachers is therefore to draw on and encourage students’ interest as much as
possible, and thus keep the required effort within reasonable bounds—neither too hard nor too easy.
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Situational interest versus personal interest
Students’ interests vary in how deeply or permanently they are located within students. Situational interests
are ones that are triggered temporarily by features of the immediate situation. Unusual sights, sounds, or words can
stimulate situational interest. A teacher might show an interesting image on the overhead projector, or play a brief
bit of music, or make a surprising comment in passing. At a more abstract level, unusual or surprising topics of
discussion can also arouse interest when they are first introduced. Personal interests are relatively permanent
preferences of the student, and are usually expressed in a variety of situations. In the classroom, a student may (or
may not) have a personal interest in particular topics, activities, or subject matter. Outside class, though, he or she
usually has additional personal interests in particular non-academic activities (e.g. sports, music) or even in
particular people (a celebrity, a friend who lives nearby). The non-academic personal interests may sometimes
conflict with academic interest; it may be more interesting to go to the shopping mall with a friend than to study
even your most favorite subject.
Benefits of personal interest
In general, personal interest in an academic topic or activity tends to correlate with achievement related to the
topic or activity. As you might suppose, a student who is truly interested is more likely to focus on the topic or
activity more fully, to work at it for longer periods, to use more thoughtful strategies in learning—and to enjoy
doing so (Hidi, 2001; Hidi & Renninger, 2006). Small wonder that the student achieves more! Note, though, a
persistent ambiguity about this benefit: it is often not clear whether personal interest leads to higher achievement,
or higher achievement leads to stronger interest. Either possibility seems plausible. Research to sort them out,
however, has suggested that at least some of the influence goes in the direction from interest to achievement; when
elementary students were given books from which to learn about a new topic, for example, they tended to learn
more from books which they chose themselves than from books that were simply assigned (Reynolds & Symons,
2001). So interest seemed to lead to learning. But this conclusion does not rule out its converse, that achievement
may stimulate interest as well. As Joe learns more about history, he steadily finds history more interesting; as
McKenzie learns more about biology, she gradually wants to learn more of it.
Stimulating situational interests
If a student has little prior personal interest in a topic or activity, the teacher is faced with stimulating initial,
situational interest, in hopes that the initial interest will gradually become more permanent and personal. There are
a number of strategies for meeting this challenge:
• It helps to include surprises in your comments and in classroom activities from time to time: tell students
facts that are true but counter-intuitive, for example, or demonstrate a science experiment that turns out
differently than students expect (Guthrie, Wigfield, & Humenick, 2006).
• It also helps to relate new material to students’ prior experiences even if their experiences are not related to
academics or to school directly. The concepts of gravitation and acceleration, for example, operate every
time a ball is hit or thrown in a softball game. If this connection is pointed out to a student who enjoys
playing a lot of softball, the concepts can make concepts more interesting.
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• It helps to encourage students to respond to new material actively. By having students talk about the
material together, for example, students can begin making their own connections to prior personal
interests, and the social interaction itself helps to link the material to their personal, social interests as well.
A caution: seductive details
Even though it is important to stimulate interest in new material somehow, it is also possible to mislead or
distract students accidentally by adding inappropriate, but stimulating features to new material (Garner, et al.,
1992; Harp & Mayer, 1998). Distractions happen a number of ways, such as any of these among others:
• deliberately telling jokes in class
• using colorful illustrations or pictures
• adding interesting bits of information to a written or verbal explanation
When well chosen, all of these moves can indeed arouse students’ interest in a new topic. But if they do not
really relate to the topic at hand, they may simply create misunderstandings or prevent students from focusing on
key material. As with most other learning processes, however, there are individual differences among students in
distractability, students who are struggling, and are more prone to distraction and misunderstanding than students
who are already learning more successfully (Sanchez & Wiley, 2006). On balance the best advice is probably
therefore to use strategies to arouse situational interest, but to assess students’ responses to them continually and
as honestly as possible. The key issue is whether students seem to learn because of stimulating strategies that you
provide, or in spite of them.
Motives related to attributions
Attributions are perceptions about the causes of success and failure. Suppose that you get a low mark on a test
and are wondering what caused the low mark. You can construct various explanations for—make various
attributions about—this failure. Maybe you did not study very hard; maybe the test itself was difficult; maybe you
were unlucky; maybe you just are not smart enough. Each explanation attributes the failure to a different factor.
The explanations that you settle upon may reflect the truth accurately—or then again, they may not. What is
important about attributions is that they reflect personal beliefs about the sources or causes of success and failure.
As such, they tend to affect motivation in various ways, depending on the nature of the attribution (Weiner, 2005).
Locus, stability, and controllability
Attributions vary in three underlying ways: locus, stability, and controllability. Locus of an attribution is the
location (figuratively speaking) of the source of success or failure. If you attribute a top mark on a test to your
ability, then the locus is internal; if you attribute the mark to the test’s having easy questions, then the locus is
external. The stability of an attribution is its relative permanence. If you attribute the mark to your ability, then
the source of success is relatively stable—by definition, ability is a relatively lasting quality. If you attribute a top
mark to the effort you put in to studying, then the source of success is unstable—effort can vary and has to be
renewed on each occasion or else it disappears. The controllability of an attribution is the extent to which the
individual can influence it. If you attribute a top mark to your effort at studying, then the source of success is
relatively controllable—you can influence effort simply by deciding how much to study. But if you attribute the
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mark to simple luck, then the source of the success is uncontrollable—there is nothing that can influence random
chance.
As you might suspect, the way that these attributions combine affects students’ academic motivations in major
ways. It usually helps both motivation and achievement if a student attributes academic successes and failures to
factors that are internal and controllable, such as effort or a choice to use particular learning strategies (Dweck,
2000). Attributing successes to factors that are internal but stable or controllable (like ability), on the other hand, is
both a blessing and a curse: sometimes it can create optimism about prospects for future success (“I always do
well”), but it can also lead to indifference about correcting mistakes (Dweck, 2006), or even create pessimism if a
student happens not to perform at the accustomed level (“Maybe I’m not as smart as I thought”). Worst of all for
academic motivation are attributions, whether stable or not, related to external factors. Believing that performance
depends simply on luck (“The teacher was in a bad mood when marking”) or on excessive difficulty of material
removes incentive for a student to invest in learning. All in all, then, it seems important for teachers to encourage
internal, stable attributions about success.
Influencing students’ attributions
How can they do so? One way or another, the effective strategies involve framing teachers’ own explanations of
success and failure around internal, controllable factors. Instead of telling a student: “Good work! You’re smart!”,
try saying: “Good work! Your effort really made a difference, didn’t it?” If a student fails, instead of saying,“Too
bad! This material is just too hard for you,” try saying, “Let’s find a strategy for practicing this more, and then you
can try again.” In both cases the first option emphasizes uncontrollable factors (effort, difficulty level), and the
second option emphasizes internal, controllable factors (effort, use of specific strategies).
Such attributions will only be convincing, however, if teachers provide appropriate conditions for students to
learn—conditions in which students’ efforts really do pay off. There are three conditions that have to be in place in
particular. First, academic tasks and materials actually have to be at about the right level of difficulty. If you give
problems in advanced calculus to a first-grade student, the student will not only fail them but also be justified in
attributing the failure to an external factor, task difficulty. If assignments are assessed in ways that produce highly
variable, unreliable marks, then students will rightly attribute their performance to an external, unstable source:
luck. Both circumstances will interfere with motivation.
Second, teachers also need to be ready to give help to individuals who need it—even if they believe that an
assignment is easy enough or clear enough that students should not need individual help. Readiness to help is
always essential because it is often hard to know in advance exactly how hard a task will prove to be for particular
students. Without assistance, a task that proves difficult initially may remain difficult indefinitely, and the student
will be tempted to make unproductive, though correct, attributions about his or her failure (“I will never
understand this”, “I’m not smart enough”, or “It doesn’t matter how hard I study”).
Third, teachers need to remember that ability—usually considered a relatively stable factor—often actually
changes incrementally over the long term. Recognizing this fact is one of the best ways to bring about actual
increases in students’ abilities (Blackwell, Trzniewski, & Dweck, 2007; Schunk, Pintrich, & Meese, 2008). A middle-
years student might play the trumpet in the school band at a high level of ability, but this ability actually reflects a
lot of previous effort and a gradual increase in ability. A second grade student who reads fluently, in this sense may
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have high current ability to read; but at some point in the distant past that same student could not read as well, and
even further back he may not have been able to read at all. The increases in ability have happened at least in part
because of effort. While these ideas may seem obvious, they can easily be forgotten in the classroom because effort
and ability evolve according to very different time frames. Effort and its results appear relatively immediately; a
student expends effort this week, this day, or even at this very moment, and the effort (if not the results) are visible
right away. But ability may take longer to show itself; a student often develops it only over many weeks, months, or
years.
Motivation as self-efficacy
In addition to being influenced by their goals, interests, and attributions, students’ motives are affected by
specific beliefs about the student’s personal capacities. In self-efficacy theory the beliefs become a primary,
explicit explanation for motivation (Bandura, 1977, 1986, 1997). Self-efficacy is the belief that you are capable of
carrying out a specific task or of reaching a specific goal. Note that the belief and the action or goal are specific. Self-
efficacy is a belief that you can write an acceptable term paper, for example, or repair an automobile, or make
friends with the new student in class. These are relatively specific beliefs and tasks. Self-efficacy is not about
whether you believe that you are intelligent in general, whether you always like working with mechanical things, or
think that you are generally a likeable person. These more general judgments are better regarded as various
mixtures of self-concepts (beliefs about general personal identity) or of self-esteem (evaluations of identity). They
are important in their own right, and sometimes influence motivation, but only indirectly (Bong & Skaalvik, 2004).
Self-efficacy beliefs, furthermore, are not the same as “true” or documented skill or ability. They are self-
constructed, meaning that they are personally developed perceptions. There can sometimes therefore be
discrepancies between a person’s self-efficacy beliefs and the person’s abilities. You can believe that you can write a
good term paper, for example, without actually being able to do so, and vice versa: you can believe yourself
incapable of writing a paper, but discover that you are in fact able to do so. In this way self-efficacy is like the
everyday idea of confidence, except that it is defined more precisely. And as with confidence, it is possible to have
either too much or too little self-efficacy. The optimum level seems to be either at or slightly above true capacity
(Bandura, 1997). As we indicate below, large discrepancies between self-efficacy and ability can create motivational
problems for the individual.
Effects of self-efficacy on students’ behavior
Self-efficacy may sound like a uniformly desirable quality, but research as well as teachers’ experience suggests
that its effects are a bit more complicated than they first appear. Self-efficacy has three main effects, each of which
has both a “dark” or undesirable side and a positive or desirable side.
Choice of tasks
The first effect is that self-efficacy makes students more willing to choose tasks where they already feel confident
of succeeding. This effect is almost inevitable, given the definition of the concept of self-efficacy, it has also been
supported by research on self-efficacy beliefs (Pajares & Schunk, 2001). For teachers, the effect on choice can be
either welcome or not, depending on circumstances. If a student believes that he or she can solve mathematical
problems, then the student is more likely to attempt the mathematics homework that the teacher assigns.
Unfortunately the converse is also true. If a student believes that he or she is incapable of math, then the student is
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less likely to attempt the math homework (perhaps telling himself, “What’s the use of trying?”), regardless of the
student’s actual ability in math.
Since self-efficacy is self-constructed, furthermore, it is also possible for students to miscalculate or misperceive
their true skill, and the misperceptions themselves can have complex effects on students’ motivations. From a
teacher’s point of view, all is well even if students overestimate their capacity but actually do succeed at a relevant
task anyway, or if they underestimate their capacity, yet discover that they can succeed and raise their self-efficacy
beliefs as a result. All may not be well, though, if students do not believe that they can succeed and therefore do not
even try, or if students overestimate their capacity by a wide margin, but are disappointed unexpectedly by failure
and lower their self-efficacy beliefs.
Persistence at tasks
A second effect of high self-efficacy is to increase a persistence at relevant tasks. If you believe that you can solve
crossword puzzles, but encounter one that takes longer than usual, then you are more likely to work longer at the
puzzle until you (hopefully) really do solve it. This is probably a desirable behavior in many situations, unless the
persistence happens to interfere with other, more important tasks (what if you should be doing homework instead
of working on crossword puzzles?). If you happen to have low self-efficacy for crosswords, on the other hand, then
you are more likely to give up early on a difficult puzzle. Giving up early may often be undesirable because it
deprives you of a chance to improve your skill by persisting. Then again (on the third hand?), the consequent lack of
success because of giving up may provide a useful incentive to improve your crossword skills. And again,
misperceptions of capacity make a difference. Overestimating your capacity by a lot (excessively high self-efficacy)
might lead you not to prepare for or focus on a task properly, and thereby impair your performance. So as with
choosing tasks, the effects of self-efficacy vary from one individual to another and one situation to another. The
teacher’s task is therefore two-fold: first, to discern the variations, and second, to encourage the positive self-
efficacy beliefs. Table 15 offers some additional advice about how to do this.
Table 15: Ways of encouraging self-efficacy beliefs Example of what the teacher might say
Strategy
1. Set goals with students, and get a commitment “By the end of the month, I want you to know all of
from them to reach the goals. the times table up to 25 x 25. Can I count on you to do
that?”
2. Encourage students to compare their performance “Compare that drawing against the one that you
with their own previous performance, not with other made last semester. I think you’ll find improvements!”
students.
3. Point out links between effort and improvement. “I saw you studying for this test more this week. No
wonder you did better this time!”
4. In giving feedback about performance, focus on “Part 1 of the lab write-up was very detailed, just as
information, not evaluative judgments. the assignment asked. Part 2 has a lot of good ideas in
it, but it needs to be more detailed and stated more
explicitly.”
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6. Student motivation “Every time I read another one of your essays, I see
more good ideas than the last time. They are so much
5. Point out that increases in knowledge or skill more complete than when you started the year.”
happen gradually by sustained effort, not because of
inborn ability.
Response to failure
High self-efficacy for a task not only increases a person’s persistence at the task, but also improves their ability
to cope with stressful conditions and to recover their motivation following outright failures. Suppose that you have
two assignments—an essay and a science lab report—due on the same day, and this circumstance promises to make
your life hectic as you approach the deadline. You will cope better with the stress of multiple assignments if you
already believe yourself capable of doing both of the tasks, than if you believe yourself capable of doing just one of
them or (especially) of doing neither. You will also recover better in the unfortunate event that you end up with a
poor grade on one or even both of the tasks.
That is the good news. The bad news, at least from a teacher’s point of view, is that the same resilience can
sometimes also serve non-academic and non-school purposes. How so? Suppose, instead of two school assignments
due on the same day, a student has only one school assignment due, but also holds a part-time evening job as a
server in a local restaurant. Suppose, further, that the student has high self-efficacy for both of these tasks; he
believes, in other words, that he is capable of completing the assignment as well as continuing to work at the job.
The result of such resilient beliefs can easily be a student who devotes less attention to school work than ideal, and
who even ends up with a lower grade on the assignment than he or she is capable of.
Learned helplessness and self-efficacy
If a person’s sense of self-efficacy is very low, he or she can develop learned helplessness, a perception of
complete lack of control in mastering a task. The attitude is similar to depression, a pervasive feeling of apathy and
a belief that effort makes no difference and does not lead to success. Learned helplessness was originally studied
from the behaviorist perspective of classical and operant conditioning by the psychologist Martin Seligman (1995).
The studies used a somewhat “gloomy” experimental procedure in which an animal, such as a rat or a dog, was
repeatedly shocked in a cage in a way that prevented the animal from escaping the shocks. In a later phase of the
procedure, conditions were changed so that the animal could avoid the shocks by merely moving from one side of
the cage to the other. Yet frequently they did not bother to do so! Seligman called this behavior learned
helplessness.
In people, learned helplessness leads to characteristic ways of dealing with problems. They tend to attribute the
source of a problem to themselves, to generalize the problem to many aspects of life, and to see the problem as
lasting or permanent. More optimistic individuals, in contrast, are more likely to attribute a problem to outside
sources, to see it as specific to a particular situation or activity, and to see it as temporary or time-limited. Consider,
for example, two students who each fail a test. The one with a lot of learned helplessness is more likely to explain
the failure by saying something like: “I’m stupid; I never perform well on any schoolwork, and I never will perform
well at it.” The other, more optimistic student is more likely to say something like: “The teacher made the test too
hard this time, so the test doesn’t prove anything about how I will do next time or in other subjects.”
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What is noteworthy about these differences in perception is how much the more optimistic of these perspectives
resembles high self-efficacy and how much learned helplessness seems to contradict or differ from it. As already
noted, high self-efficacy is a strong belief in one’s capacity to carry out a specific task successfully. By definition
therefore self-efficacy focuses attention on a temporary or time-limited activity (the task), even though the cause of
successful completion (oneself) is “internal”. Teachers can minimize learned helplessness in students, therefore, by
encouraging their self-efficacy beliefs. There are several ways of doing this, as we explain next.
Sources of self-efficacy beliefs
Psychologists who study self-efficacy have identified four major sources of self-efficacy beliefs (Pajares &
Schunk, 2001, 2002). In order of importance they are (1) prior experiences of mastering tasks, (2) watching others’
mastering tasks, (3) messages or “persuasion” from others, and (4) emotions related to stress and discomfort.
Fortunately the first three can be influenced by teachers directly, and even the fourth can sometimes be influenced
indirectly by appropriate interpretive comments from the teacher or others.
Prior experiences of mastery
Not surprisingly, past successes at a task increase students’ beliefs that they will succeed again in the future. The
implication of this basic fact means that teachers need to help students build a history of successes. Whether they
are math problems, reading assignments, or athletic activities, tasks have to end with success more often than with
failure. Note, though, that the successes have to represent mastery that is genuine or competence that is truly
authentic. Success at tasks that are trivial or irrelevant do not improve self-efficacy beliefs, nor does praise for
successes that a student has not really had (Erikson, 1968/1994).
As a practical matter, creating a genuine history of success is most convincing if teachers also work to broaden a
student’s vision of “the past”. Younger students (elementary-age) in particular have relatively short or limited ideas
of what counts as “past experience”; they may go back only a few occasions when forming impressions of whether
they can succeed again in the future (Eccles, et al., 1998). Older students (secondary school) gradually develop
longer views of their personal “pasts”, both because of improvements in memory and because of accumulating a
personal history that is truly longer. The challenge for working with any age, however, is to insure that students
base self-efficacy beliefs on all relevant experiences from their pasts, not just on selected or recent experiences.
Watching others’ experiences of mastery
A second source of efficacy beliefs comes from vicarious experience of mastery, or observing others’ successes
(Schunk & Zimmerman, 1997). Simply seeing someone else succeed at a task, in other words, can contribute to
believing that you, too, can succeed. The effect is stronger when the observer lacks experience with the task and
therefore may be unsure of his or her own ability. It is also stronger when the model is someone respected by the
observer, such as a student’s teacher, or a peer with generally comparable ability. Even under these conditions,
though, vicarious experience is not as influential as direct experience. The reasons are not hard to imagine.
Suppose, for example, you witness both your teacher and a respected friend succeed at singing a favorite tune, but
you are unsure whether you personally can sing. In that case you may feel encouraged about your own potential,
but are likely still to feel somewhat uncertain of your own efficacy. If on the other hand you do not witness others’
singing, but you have a history of singing well yourself, it is a different story. In that case you are likely to believe in
your efficacy, regardless of how others perform.
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All of which suggests that to a modest extent, teachers may be able to enhance students’ self-efficacy by
modeling success at a task or by pointing out classmates who are successful. These strategies can work because they
not only show how to do a task, but also communicate a more fundamental message, the fact that the task can in
fact be done. If students are learning a difficult arithmetic procedure, for example, you can help by demonstrating
the procedure, or by pointing out classmates who are doing it. Note, though, that vicarious mastery is helpful only if
backed up with real successes performed by the students themselves. It is also helpful only if the “model
classmates” are perceived as truly comparable in ability. Overuse of vicarious models, especially in the absence of
real success by learners, can cause learners to disqualify a model’s success; students may simply decide that the
model is “out of their league” in skills and is therefore irrelevant to judging their own potential.
Social messages and persuasion
A third source of efficacy beliefs are encouragements, both implied and stated, that persuade a person of his or
her capacity to do a task. Persuasion does not create high efficacy by itself, but it often increases or supports it when
coupled with either direct or vicarious experience, especially when the persuasion comes from more than one
person (Goddard, Hoy, & Hoy, 2004).
For teachers, this suggests two things. The first, of course, is that encouragement can motivate students,
especially when it is focused on achievable, specific tasks. It can be motivating to say things like: “I think you can do
it” or “I’ve seen you do this before, so I know that you can do it again”. But the second implication is that teachers
should arrange wherever possible to support their encouragement by designing tasks at hand that are in fact
achievable by the student. Striking a balance of encouragement and task difficulty may seem straightforward, but
sometimes it can be challenging because students can sometimes perceive teachers’ comments and tasks quite
differently from how teachers intend. Giving excessive amounts of detailed help, for example, may be intended as
support for a student, but be taken as a lack of confidence in the student’s ability to do the task independently.
Emotions related to success, stress or discomfort
The previous three sources of efficacy beliefs are all rather cognitive or “thinking oriented”, but emotions also
influence expectations of success or failure. Feeling nervous or anxious just before speaking to a large group
(sometimes even just a class full of students!) can function like a message that says “I’m not going to succeed at
doing this”, even if there is in fact good reason to expect success. But positive feelings can also raise beliefs about
efficacy. When recalling the excitement of succeeding at a previous, unrelated task, people may overestimate their
chances of success at a new task with which they have no previous experience, and are therefore in no position to
predict their efficacy.
For teachers, the most important implication is that students’ motivation can be affected when they generalize
from past experience which they believe, rightly or wrongly, to be relevant. By simply announcing a test, for
example, a teacher can make some students anxious even before the students find out anything about the test—
whether it is easy or difficult, or even comparable in any way to other experiences called “tests” in their pasts.
Conversely, it can be misleading to encourage students on the basis of their success at past academic tasks if the
earlier tasks were not really relevant to requirements of the new tasks at hand. Suppose, for example, that a middle-
years student has previously written only brief opinion-based papers, and never written a research-based paper. In
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that case boosting the student’s confidence by telling him that “it is just like the papers you wrote before” may not
be helpful or even honest.
A caution: motivation as content versus motivation as process
A caution about self-efficacy theory is its heavy emphasis on just the process of motivation, at the expense of the
content of motivation. The basic self-efficacy model has much to say about how beliefs affect behavior, but
relatively little to say about which beliefs and tasks are especially satisfying or lead to the greatest well-being in
students. The answer to this question is important to know, since teachers might then select tasks as much as
possible that are intrinsically satisfying, and not merely achievable.
Another way of posing this concern is by asking: “Is it possible to feel high self-efficacy about a task that you do
not enjoy?” It does seem quite possible for such a gap to exist. As a youth, for example, one of us (Kelvin Seifert)
had considerable success with solving mathematics problems in high school algebra, and expended considerable
effort doing algebra assignments as homework. Before long, he had developed high self-efficacy with regard to
solving such problems. But Kelvin never really enjoyed solving the algebra problems, and later even turned away
permanently from math or science as a career (much to the disappointment of his teachers and family). In this case
self-efficacy theory nicely explained the process of his motivation—Kelvin’s belief in his capacity led to persistence
at the tasks. But it did not explain the content of his motivation—his growing dislike of the tasks. Accounting for
such a gap requires a different theory of motivation, one that includes not only specific beliefs, but “deeper”
personal needs as well. An example of this approach is self-determination theory, where we turn next.
Motivation as self-determination
Common sense suggests that human motivations originate from some sort of inner “need”. We all think of
ourselves as having various “needs”, a need for food, for example, or a need for companionship—that influences our
choices and activities. This same idea also forms part of some theoretical accounts of motivation, though the
theories differ in the needs that they emphasize or recognize. In Chapter 2, for example, we talked about Maslow’s
hierarchy of needs as an example of motivations that function like needs that influence long-term personal
development. According to Maslow, individuals must satisfy physical survival needs before they seek to satisfy
needs of belonging, they satisfy belonging needs before esteem needs, and so on. In theory, too, people have both
deficit needs and growth needs, and the deficit needs must be satisfied before growth needs can influence behavior
(Maslow, 1970). In Maslow’s theory, as in others that use the concept, a need is a relatively lasting condition or
feeling that requires relief or satisfaction and that tends to influence action over the long term. Some needs may
decrease when satisfied (like hunger), but others may not (like curiosity). Either way, needs differ from the self-
efficacy beliefs discussed earlier, which are relatively specific and cognitive, and affect particular tasks and
behaviors fairly directly.
A recent theory of motivation based on the idea of needs is self-determination theory, proposed by the
psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan (2000), among others. The theory proposes that understanding
motivation requires taking into account three basic human needs:
• autonomy—the need to feel free of external constraints on behavior
• competence—the need to feel capable or skilled
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• relatedness—the need to feel connected or involved with others
Note that these needs are all psychological, not physical; hunger and sex, for example, are not on the list. They
are also about personal growth or development, not about deficits that a person tries to reduce or eliminate. Unlike
food (in behaviorism) or safety (in Maslow’s hierarchy), you can never get enough of autonomy, competence, or
relatedness. You (and your students) will seek to enhance these continually throughout life.
The key idea of self-determination theory is that when persons (such as you or one of your students) feel that
these basic needs are reasonably well met, they tend to perceive their actions and choices to be intrinsically
motivated or “self-determined”. In that case they can turn their attention to a variety of activities that they find
attractive or important, but that do not relate directly to their basic needs. Among your students, for example, some
individuals might read books that you have suggested, and others might listen attentively when you explain key
concepts from the unit that you happen to be teaching. If one or more basic needs are not met well, however, people
will tend to feel coerced by outside pressures or external incentives. They may become preoccupied, in fact, with
satisfying whatever need has not been met and thus exclude or avoid activities that might otherwise be interesting,
educational, or important. If the persons are students, their learning will suffer.
Self-determination and intrinsic motivation
In proposing the importance of needs, then, self-determination theory is asserting the importance of intrinsic
motivation, an idea that has come up before in this book (see especially Chapter 1, about learning theory), and that
will come again later (see especially Chapter 9, about planning instruction). The self-determination version of
intrinsic motivation, however, emphasizes a person’s perception of freedom, rather than the presence or absence of
“real” constraints on action. Self-determination means a person feels free, even if the person is also operating
within certain external constraints. In principle, a student can experience self-determination even if the student
must, for example, live within externally imposed rules of appropriate classroom behavior. To achieve a feeling of
self-determination, however, the student’s basic needs must be met—needs for autonomy, competence, and
relatedness. In motivating students, then, the bottom line is that teachers have an interest in helping students to
meet their basic needs, and in not letting school rules or the teachers’ own leadership styles interfere with or block
satisfaction of students’ basic needs.
“Pure” self-determination may be the ideal for most teachers and students, of course, but the reality is usually
different. For a variety of reasons, teachers in most classrooms cannot be expected to meet all students’ basic needs
at all times. One reason is the sheer number of students, which makes it impossible to attend to every student
perfectly at all times. Another reason is teachers’ responsibility for a curriculum, which can require creating
expectations for students’ activities that sometimes conflict with students’ autonomy or makes them feel
(temporarily) less than fully competent. Still another reason is students’ personal histories, ranging from divorce to
poverty, which may create needs in some individuals which are beyond the power of teachers to remedy.
The result from students’ point of view is usually only a partial perception of self-determination, and therefore a
simultaneous mix of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. Self-determination theory recognizes this reality by
suggesting that the “intrinsic-ness” of motivation is really a matter of degree, extending from highly extrinsic,
through various mixtures of intrinsic and extrinsic, to highly intrinsic (Koestner & Losier, 2004). At the extrinsic
end of the scale is learning that is regulated primarily by external rewards and constraints, whereas at the intrinsic
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end is learning regulated primarily by learners themselves. Table 16 summarizes and gives examples of the various
levels and their effects on motivation. By assuming that motivation is often a mix of the intrinsic and extrinsic, the
job of the teacher becomes more realistic; the job is not to expect purely intrinsic motivation from students all the
time, but simply to arrange and encourage motivations that are as intrinsic as possible. To do this, the teacher
needs to support students’ basic needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness.
Table 16: Combinations of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation
Source of regulation of Description Example
action
“Pure” extrinsic motivation Person lacks the intention to take Student completes no work even
any action, regardless of pressures when pressured or when incentives
or incentives are offered
Very external to person Actions regulated only by outside Student completes assignment
pressures and incentives, and only if reminded explicitly of the
controls incentive of grades and/or negative
consequences of failing
Somewhat external Specific actions regulated Student completes assignment
internally, but without reflection or independently, but only because of
connection to personal needs fear of shaming self or because of
guilt about consequences of not
completing assignment
Somewhat internal Actions recognized by individual Student generally completes
as important or as valuable as a school work independently, but only
means to a more valued goal because of its value in gaining
admission to college
Very internal Actions adopted by individual as Student generally completes
integral to self-concept and to school work independently, because
person’s major personal values being well educated is part of the
student’s concept of himself
“Pure” intrinsic regulation Actions practiced solely because Student enjoys every topic,
they are enjoyable and valued for concept, and assignment that every
their own sake teacher ever assigns, and completes
school work solely because of his
enjoyment
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Using self-determination theory in the classroom
What are some teaching strategies for supporting students’ needs? Educational researchers have studied this
question from a variety of directions, and their resulting recommendations converge and overlap in a number of
ways. For convenience, the recommendations can be grouped according to the basic need that they address,
beginning with the need for autonomy.
Supporting autonomy in learners
A major part of supporting autonomy is to give students choices wherever possible (Ryan & Lynch, 2003). The
choices that encourage the greatest feelings of self-control, obviously, are ones that are about relatively major issues
or that have relatively significant consequences for students, such as whom to choose as partners for a major group
project. But choices also encourage some feeling of self-control even when they are about relatively minor issues,
such as how to organize your desk or what kind of folder to use for storing your papers at school. It is important,
furthermore, to offer choices to all students, including students needing explicit directions in order to work
successfully; avoid reserving choices for only the best students or giving up offering choices altogether to students
who fall behind or who need extra help. All students will feel more self-determined and therefore more motivated if
they have choices of some sort.
Teachers can also support students’ autonomy more directly by minimizing external rewards (like grades) and
comparisons among students’ performance, and by orienting and responding themselves to students’ expressed
goals and interests. In teaching elementary students about climate change, for example, you can support autonomy
by exploring which aspects of this topic have already come to students’ attention and aroused their concern. The
point of the discussion would not be to find out “who knows the most” about this topic, but to build and enhance
students’ intrinsic motivations as much as possible. In reality, of course, it may not be possible to succeed at this
goal fully—some students may simply have no interest in the topic, for example, or you may be constrained by time
or resources from individualizing certain activities fully. But any degree of attention to students’ individuality, as
well as any degree of choice, will support students’ autonomy.
Supporting the need for competence
The most obvious way to make students feel competent is by selecting activities which are challenging but
nonetheless achievable with reasonable effort and assistance (Elliott, McGregor, & Thrash, 2004). Although few
teachers would disagree with this idea, there are times when it is hard to put into practice, such as when you first
meet a class at the start of a school year and therefore are unfamiliar with their backgrounds and interests. But
there are some strategies that are generally effective even if you are not yet in a position to know the students well.
One is to emphasize activities that require active response from students. Sometimes this simply means selecting
projects, experiments, discussions and the like that require students to do more than simply listen. Other times it
means expecting active responses in all interactions with students, such as by asking questions that call for
“divergent” (multiple or elaborated) answers. In a social studies class, for example, try asking “What are some ways
we could find out more about our community?” instead of “Tell me the three best ways to find out about our
community.” The first question invites more divergent, elaborate answers than the second.
Another generally effective way to support competence is to respond and give feedback as immediately as
possible. Tests and term papers help subsequent learning more if returned, with comments, sooner rather than
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later. Discussions teach more if you include your own ideas in them, while still encouraging students’ input. Small
group and independent activities are more effective if you provide a convenient way for students to consult
authoritative sources for guidance when needed, whether the source is you personally, a teaching assistant, a
specially selected reading, or even a computer program. In addition, you can sometimes devise tasks that create a
feeling of competence because they have a “natural” solution or ending point. Assembling a jigsaw puzzle of the
community, for example, has this quality, and so does creating a jigsaw puzzle of the community if the students
need a greater challenge.
Supporting the need to relate to others
The main way of support students’ need to relate to others is to arrange activities in which students work
together in ways that are mutually supportive, that recognize students’ diversity, and minimize competition among
individuals. We will have more to say about this strategy in Chapter 8 (“Instructional strategies”), where we
describe several varieties of cooperative learning, as well as some of their pitfalls to be avoided. For now, simply
note that having students work together can happen in many ways. You can, for example, deliberately arrange
projects that require a variety of talents; some educators call such activities “rich group work” (Cohen, 1994; Cohen,
Brody, & Sapon-Shevin, 2004). In studying in small groups about medieval society, for example, one student can
contribute his drawing skills, another can contribute his writing skills, and still another can contribute his dramatic
skills. The result can be a multi-faceted presentation—written, visual, and oral. The groups needed for rich group
work provide for students’ relationships with each other, whether they contain six individuals or only two.
There are other ways to encourage relationships among students. In the jigsaw classroom (Aronson & Patnoe,
1997), for example, students work together in two phases. In the first phase, groups of “experts” work together to
find information on a specialized topic. In a second phase the expert groups split up and reform into “generalist”
groups containing one representative from each former expert group. In studying the animals of Africa, for
example, each expert group might find information about a different particular category of animal or plant; one
group might focus on mammal, another on bird, a third on reptiles, and so on. In the second phase of the jigsaw,
the generalist groups would pool information from the experts to get a more well-rounded view of the topic. The
generalist groups would each have an expert about mammals, for example, but also an expert about birds and about
reptiles.
As a teacher, you can add to these organizational strategies by encouraging the development of your own
relationships with class members. Your goal, as teacher, is to demonstrate caring and interest in your students not
just as students, but as people. The goal also involves behaving as if good relationships between and among class
members are not only possible, but ready to develop and perhaps even already developing. A simple tactic, for
example, is to speak of “we” and “us” as much as possible, rather than speaking of “you students”. Another tactic is
to present cooperative activities and assignments without apology, as if they are in the best interests not just of
students, but of “us all” in the classroom, yourself included.
Keeping self-determination in perspective
In certain ways self-determination theory provides a sensible way to think about students’ intrinsic motivation
and therefore to think about how to get them to manage their own learning. A particular strength of the theory is
that it recognizes degrees of self-determination and bases many ideas on this reality. Most people recognize
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combinations of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation guiding particular activities in their own lives. We might enjoy
teaching, for example, but also do this job partly to receive a paycheck. To its credit, self-determination theory also
relies on a list of basic human needs—autonomy, competence, and relatedness—that relate comfortably with some
of the larger purposes of education.
Although these are positive features for understanding and influencing students’ classroom motivation, some
educators and psychologists nonetheless have lingering questions about the limitations of self-determination
theory. One is whether merely providing choices actually improves students’ learning, or simply improves their
satisfaction with learning. There is evidence supporting both possibilities (Flowerday & Schraw, 2003; Deci &
Ryan, 2003), and it is likely that there are teachers whose classroom experience supports both possibilities as well.
Another question is whether it is possible to overdo attention to students’ needs—and again there is evidence for
both favoring and contradicting this possibility. Too many choices can actually make anyone (not just a student)
frustrated and dissatisfied with a choice the person actually does make (Schwartz, 2004). Furthermore,
differentiating activities to students’ competence levels may be impractical if students are functioning at extremely
diverse levels within a single class, as sometimes happens. Differentiating may be inappropriate, too, if it holds a
teacher back from covering key curriculum objectives which students need and which at least some students are
able to learn. These are serious concerns, though in our opinion not serious enough to give up offering choices to
students or to stop differentiating instruction altogether. In Chapter 7 (“Classroom management and the learning
environment”), therefore, we explain the practical basis for this opinion, by describing workable ways for offering
choices and recognizing students’ diversity.
Expectancy x value: effects on students’ motivation
As we have explained in this chapter, motivation is affected by several factors, including reinforcement for
behavior, but especially also students’ goals, interests, and sense of self-efficacy and self-determination. The factors
combine to create two general sources of motivation: students’ expectation of success and the value that students
place on a goal. Viewing motivation in this way is often called the expectancy-value model of motivation (Wigfield &
Eccles, 2002; Wigfield, Tonk, & Eccles, 2004), and sometimes written with a multiplicative formula: expectancy x
value = motivation. The relationship between expectation and value is “multiplicative” rather than additive because
in order to be motivated, it is necessary for a person to have at least a modest expectation of success and to assign a
task at least some positive value. If you have high expectations of success but do not value a task at all (mentally
assign it a “0” value), then you will not feel motivated at all. Likewise, if you value a task highly but have no
expectation of success about completing it (assign it a “0” expectancy), then you also will not feel motivated at all.
Expectancies are the result of various factors, but particularly the goals held by a student, and the student’s self-
efficacy, which we discussed earlier in this chapter. A student with mastery goals and strong self-efficacy for a task,
for example, is likely to hold high expectations for success—almost by definition. Values are also the result of
various factors, but especially students’ interests and feelings of self-determination. A student who has a lasting
personal interest in a task or topic and is allowed to choose it freely is especially likely to value the task—and
therefore to feel motivated.
Ideally both expectancies and values are high in students on any key learning task. The reality, however, is that
students sometimes do not expect success, nor do they necessarily value it when success is possible. How can a
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teacher respond to low expectations and low valuing? We have offered a number of suggestions to meet this
challenge throughout this chapter. In brief, raising low expectations depends on adjusting task difficulty so that
success becomes a reasonable prospect: a teacher must make tasks neither too hard nor too easy. Reaching this
general goal depends in turn on thoughtful, appropriate planning—selecting reasonable objectives, adjusting them
on the basis of experience, finding supportive materials, and providing students with help when needed.
Raising the value of academic tasks is equally important, but the general strategies for doing so are different
than for raising expectations. Increasing value requires linking the task to students’ personal interests and prior
knowledge, showing the utility of the task to students’ future goals, and showing that the task is valuable to other
people whom students’ respect. Some of these strategies were discussed earlier in this chapter, but others (e.g.
linking new learning with prior knowledge) are discussed in Chapter 2, which is called “The learning process”.
TARGET: a model for integrating ideas about motivation
A model of motivation that integrates many ideas about motivation, including those in this chapter, has been
developed by Carole Ames (1990, 1992). The acronym or abbreviated name for the program is TARGET, which
stands for six elements of effective motivation:
• Task
• Authority
• Recognition
• Grouping
• Evaluating
• Time
Each of the elements contributes to students' motivation either directly or indirectly.
Task
As explained earlier, students experience tasks in terms of their value, their expectation of success, and their
authenticity. The value of a task is assessed by its importance, interest to the student, usefulness or utility, and the
cost in terms of effort and time to achieve it. Expectation of success is assessed by a student's perception of the
difficulty of a task. Generally a middling level of difficulty is optimal for students; too easy, and the task seems
trivial (not valuable or meaningful), and too hard, and the task seems unlikely to succeed and in this sense useless.
Authenticity refers to how much a task relates to real-life experiences of students; the more it does so, the more it
can build on students' interests and goals, and the more meaningful and motivating it becomes.
Autonomy
Motivation is enhanced if students feel a degree of autonomy or responsibility for a learning task. Autonomy
strengthens self-efficacy and self-determination—two valued and motivating attitudes described earlier in this
chapter. Where possible, teachers can enhance autonomy by offering students' choices about assignments and by
encouraging them to take initiative about their own learning.
Recognition
Teachers can support students' motivation by recognizing their achievements appropriately. Much depends,
however, on how this is done; as discussed earlier, praise sometimes undermines performance. It is not especially
effective if praise is very general and lacking in detailed reasons for the praise; or if praise is for qualities which a
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6. Student motivation
student cannot influence (like intelligence instead of effort); or if praise is offered so widely that it loses meaning or
even becomes a signal that performance has been substandard. Many of these paradoxical effects are described by
self-determination and self-efficacy theory (and were explained earlier in this chapter).
Grouping
Motivation is affected by how students are grouped together for their work—a topic discussed in more detail in
Chapter 8 (“Instructional Strategies”). There are many ways to group students, but they tend to fall into three types:
cooperative, competitive, and individualistic (Johnson & Johnson, 1999). In cooperative learning, a set of students
work together to achieve a common goal (for example, producing a group presentation for the class); often they
receive a final grade, or part of a final grade, in common. In competitive learning, students work individually, and
their grades reflect comparisons among the students (for example, their performances are ranked relative to each
other, or they are “graded on a curve”). In individualistic learning, students work by themselves, but their grades
are unrelated to the performance of classmates. Research that compares these three forms of grouping tends to
favor cooperative learning groups, which apparently supports students' need for belonging—an idea important in
self-determination theory discussed earlier in this chapter.
Evaluation
Grouping structures obviously affect how students' efforts are evaluated. A focus on comparing students, as
happens with competitive structures, can distract students from thinking about the material to be learned, and to
focus instead on how they appear to external authorities; the question shifts from “What am I learning?” to “What
will the teacher think about my performance?” A focus on cooperative learning, on the other hand, can have double-
edged effects: students are encouraged to help their group mates, but may also be tempted to rely excessively on
others' efforts or alternatively to ignore each other's contributions and overspecialize their own contributions. Some
compromise between cooperative and individualistic structures seems to create optimal motivation for learning
(Slavin, 1995).
Time
As every teacher knows, students vary in the amount of time needed to learn almost any material or task.
Accommodating the differences can be challenging, but also important for maximizing students' motivation. School
days are often filled with interruptions and fixed intervals of time devoted to non-academic activities—facts that
make it difficult to be flexible about granting individuals different amounts of time to complete academic tasks.
Nonetheless a degree of flexibility is usually possible: larger blocks of time can sometimes be created for important
activities (for example, writing an essay), and sometimes enrichment activities can be arranged for some students
while others receive extra attention from the teacher on core or basic tasks. More about such strategies is discussed
in Chapter 8 (“Instructional Strategies”).
The bottom line about motivation: sustaining focus on learning
Sooner or later when you teach, there will be situations appropriate for each perspective about motivation
described in this chapter. There will be times when focusing exclusively on students’ appropriate behavior (or lack
thereof) will be both necessary and sufficient evidence of motivation. But there will be other times when it is
important to encourage students’ beliefs that they can accomplish specific tasks, and still other times when
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providing for students’ underlying needs for competence or social connection is important. Think of these
perspectives as alternatives to be used either singly or in combination when the time is right.
Because of your own values, attitudes, or beliefs, you may find one perspective more personally compatible than
another. Even if you settle on favorite ways of motivating students, though, we encourage you to keep the other, less
favored approaches in reserve anyway, and to experiment with them. We believe that an eclectic approach to
motivation will enrich your teaching the most, and enrich your students’ motivation and learning as well. If there is
a single lesson from the concepts about motivation outlined in this chapter, it is this: academic motivation has no
single source, and teachers motivate students the best when they assume motivation is complex. The next two
chapters look at ways of realizing such “broad-mindedness” in practice, first when you prepare activities and classes
and later when you actually teach them.
Chapter summary
Motivation—the energy or drive that gives behavior direction and focus—can be understood in a variety of ways,
each of which has implications for teaching. One perspective on motivation comes from behaviorism, and equates
underlying drives or motives with their outward, visible expression in behavior. Most others, however, come from
cognitive theories of learning and development. Motives are affected by the kind of goals set by students—whether
they are oriented to mastery, performance, failure-avoidance, or social contact. They are also affected by students’
interests, both personal and situational. And they are affected by students’ attributions about the causes of success
and failure—whether they perceive the causes are due to ability, effort, task difficulty, or luck.
A major current perspective about motivation is based on self-efficacy theory, which focuses on a person’s belief
that he or she is capable of carrying out or mastering a task. High self-efficacy affects students’ choice of tasks, their
persistence at tasks, and their resilience in the face of failure. It helps to prevent learned helplessness, a perception
of complete lack of control over mastery or success. Teachers can encourage high self-efficacy beliefs by providing
students with experiences of mastery and opportunities to see others’ experiences of mastery, by offering well-
timed messages persuading them of their capacity for success, and by interpreting students’ emotional reactions to
success, failure and stress.
An extension of self-efficacy theory is self-determination theory, which is based on the idea that everyone has
basic needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness to others. According to the theory, students will be
motivated more intrinsically if these three needs are met as much as possible. A variety of strategies can assist
teachers in doing so. As a practical matter, the strategies can encourage motivation that is more intrinsic to
students, but usually not completely intrinsic.
On the Internet
<www.des.emory.edu/mfp/self-efficacy.html> This is a rather extensive site maintained about all
aspects of self-efficacy theory. The site gives access to a number of published articles on the subject as well as to
extensive “lecture” notes by Frank Pajares, who publishes and teaches about self-efficacy theory.
<www.psych.rochester.edu/SDT/faculty/index.html> This, too, is a rather extensive site, maintained at
the University of Rochester by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, two psychologists who have published extensively
about self-determination theory. The site is especially thorough in reviewing evidence contrary to the theory and in
offering many of the actual research questionnaires which have been used to study self-determination.
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6. Student motivation
<www.indiana.edu/~reading/ieo/bibs/mot-gen.html> Here is a website that discusses many aspects of
motivation in education. It is not limited to any one theory, perspective, or concept about this topic. Many of the
references are to citations from the ERIC database (also available at <www.eric.ed.gov>), and there are links to
bibliographies on additional topics about education.
Key terms Mastery goals
Motivation
Albert Bandura Need for relatedness
Attributions of success or failure Performance goals
Autonomy, need for Personal interests
Behaviorist perspective on motivation Self-determination theory
Competence, need for Self-efficacy
Failure-avoidant goals Situational interests
Intrinsic motivation TARGET
Jigsaw classroom
Learned helplessness
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7. Classroom management
and the learning environment
This is an excerpt from a professional journal kept by one of us (Kelvin Seifert) when he was teaching
kindergarten:
20xx-11-14: Today my student Carol sat in the circle, watching others while we all played Duck,
Duck, Goose (in this game, one student is outside the circle, tags another student who then chases the
first person around the circle). Carol’s turn had already passed. Apparently she was bored, because
she flopped on her back, smiling broadly, rolling around luxuriously on the floor in the path of the
other runners. Several classmates noticed her, smiled or giggled, began flopping down as well. One
chaser tripped over a “flopper”.
“Sit up, Carol”, said I, the ever-vigilant teacher. “You’re in the way.” But no result. I repeated this
twice, firmly; then moved to pick her up.
Instantly Carol ran to the far side of the gym, still smiling broadly. Then her best friend ran off with
her. Now a whole new game was launched, or really two games: “Run-from-the-teacher” and
“Enjoy-being-watched-by-everybody”. A lot more exciting, unfortunately, than Duck, Duck, Goose!
An excerpt from Kelvin’s same journal several years later, when he was teaching math in high school:
20xx-3-4: The same four students sat in the back again today, as usual. They seem to look in every
direction except at me, even when I’m explaining material that they need to know. The way they
smile and whisper to each other, it seems almost like they are “in love” with each other, though I can’t
be sure who loves whom the most.
Others—students not part of the foursome—seem to react variously. Some seem annoyed, turn the
other way, avoid talking with the group, and so on. But others seem almost envious—as if they want
to be part of the “in” group, too, and were impressed with the foursome’s ability to get away with
being inattentive and almost rude. Either way, I think a lot of other students are being distracted.
Twice during the period today, I happened to notice members of the group passing a note, and then
giggling and looking at me. By the end, I had had enough of this sort of thing, so I kept them in
briefly after class and asked one of them to read the note. They looked a bit embarrassed and
hesitant, but eventually one of them opened the note and read it out loud. “Choose one”, it said. “Mr
Seifert looks (1) old ____, (2) stupid____, or (3) clueless____.”
Kelvin's experiences in managing these very different classrooms taught him what every teacher knows or else
quickly learns: management matters a lot. But his experiences also taught him that management is about more
than correcting the misbehaviors of individuals, more than just discipline. Classroom management is also
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7. Classroom management and the learning environment
about orchestrating or coordinating entire sets or sequences of learning activities so that everyone, misbehaving or
not, learns as easily and productively as possible. Educators sometimes therefore describe good management as the
creation of a positive learning environment, because the term calls attention to the totality of activities and
people in a classroom, as well as to their goals and expectations about learning (Jones & Jones, 2007). When one of
us (Kelvin) was teaching, he used both terms almost interchangeably, though in speaking of management he more
often was referring to individual students’ behavior and learning, and in speaking of the learning environment he
more often meant the overall “feel” of the class as a whole.
Why classroom management matters
Managing the learning environment is both a major responsibility and an on-going concern for all teachers, even
those with years of experience (Good & Brophy, 2002). There are several reasons. In the first place, a lot goes on in
classrooms simultaneously, even when students seem to be doing only one task in common. Twenty-five students
may all seem to be working on a sheet of math problems. But look more closely: several may be stuck on a
particular problem, each for different reasons. A few others have worked only the first problem or two and are now
chatting quietly with each other instead of continuing. Still others have finished and are wondering what to do next.
At any one moment each student needs something different—different information, different hints, different kinds
of encouragement. Such diversity increases even more if the teacher deliberately assigns multiple activities to
different groups or individuals (for example, if some students do a reading assignment while others do the math
problems).
Another reason that managing the environment is challenging is because a teacher can not predict everything
that will happen in a class. A well-planned lesson may fall flat on its face, or take less time than expected, and you
find yourself improvising to fill class time. On the other hand an unplanned moment may become a wonderful,
sustained exchange among students, and prompt you to drop previous plans and follow the flow of discussion.
Interruptions happen continually: a fire drill, a drop-in visit from another teacher or the principal, a call on the
intercom from the office. An activity may indeed turn out well, but also rather differently than you intended; you
therefore have to decide how, if at all, to adjust the next day's lesson to allow for this surprise.
A third reason for the importance of management is that students form opinions and perceptions about your
teaching that are inconsistent with your own. What you intend as encouragement for a shy student may seem to the
student herself like “forced participation”. An eager, outgoing classmate watching your effort to encourage the shy
student, moreover, may not see you as either encouraging or coercing, but as overlooking or ignoring other students
who already want to participate. The variety of perceptions can lead to surprises in students’ responses—most often
small ones, but occasionally major.
At the broadest, society-wide level, classroom management challenges teachers because public schooling is not
voluntary, and students’ presence in a classroom is therefore not a sign, in and of itself, that they wish to learn.
Instead, students’ presence is just a sign that an opportunity exists for teachers to motivate students to learn. Some
students, of course, do enjoy learning and being in school, almost regardless of what teachers do! Others do enjoy
school, but only because teachers have worked hard to make classroom life pleasant and interesting. Those students
become motivated because you have successfully created a positive learning environment and have sustained it
through skillful management.
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Fortunately it is possible to earn this sort of commitment from many students, and this chapter describes ways
of doing so. We begin with ways of preventing management problems from happening by increasing students’ focus
on learning. The methods include ideas about arranging classroom space, about establishing procedures, routines,
and rules, and about communicating the importance of learning to students and parents. After these prevention
oriented discussions, we look at ways of refocusing students when and if their minds or actions stray from the tasks
at hand. As you probably know from being a student, bringing students back on task can happen in many ways, and
the ways vary widely in the energy and persistence required of the teacher. We try to indicate some of these
variations, but because of space limitations and because of the richness of classroom life, we cannot describe them
all.
Preventing management problems by focusing students on learning
The easiest management problems to solve are ones that do not happen in the first place! Even before the school
year begins, you can minimize behavior problems by arranging classroom furniture and materials in ways that
encourage a focus on learning as much as possible. Later, once school begins, you can establish procedures and
rules that support a focus on learning even more.
Arranging classroom space
Viewed broadly, classrooms may seem to be arranged in similar ways, but there are actually important
alternative arrangements to consider. Variations exist because of grade level, the subjects taught, the teacher’s
philosophy of education, and of course the size of the room and the furniture available. Whatever the arrangement
that you choose, it should help students to focus on learning tasks as much as possible and minimize the chances of
distractions. Beyond these basic principles, however, the “best” arrangement depends on what your students need
and on the kind of teaching that you prefer and feel able to provide (Boyner, 2003; Nations & Boyett, 2002). The
next sections describe some of the options. In considering them (and before moving too much furniture around
your room!), you might want to try experimenting with spatial arrangements “virtually” by using one of the
computer programs available on the Internet (see: http://teacher.scholastic.com/tools/class_setup/).
Displays and wall space
All classrooms have walls, of course, and how you fill them can affect the mood or feeling of a classroom. Ample
displays make a room interesting and can be used to reinforce curriculum goals and display (and hence publicly
recognize) students’ work. But too many displays can also make a room seem “busy” or distracting as well as
physically smaller. They can also be more work to maintain. If you are starting a new school year, then, a good
strategy is to decorate some of the wall or bulletin board space, but not to fill it all immediately. Leaving some space
open leaves flexibility to respond to ideas and curriculum needs that emerge after the year is underway. The same
advice applies especially for displays that are high maintenance, such as aquariums, pets, and plants. These can
serve wonderfully as learning aids, but do not have to be in place on the first day of school. Not only the students,
but also you yourself, may already have enough to cope with at that time.
Computers in the classroom
If you are like the majority of teachers, you will have only one computer in your room, or at most just a few, and
their placement may be pre-determined by the location of power and cable outlets. If so, you need to think about
computer placement early in the process of setting up a room. Once the location of computers is set, locations for
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7. Classroom management and the learning environment
desks, high-usage shelves, and other moveable items can be chosen more sensibly—in general, as already
mentioned, so as to minimize distractions to students and to avoid unnecessary traffic congestion.
Visibility of and interactions with students
Learning is facilitated if the furniture and space allow you to see all students and to interact with them from a
comfortable distance. Usually this means that the main, central part of the room—where desks and tables are
usually located—needs to be as open and as spacious as possible. While this idea may seem obvious, enacting it can
be challenging in practice if the room itself is small or shaped unusually. In classrooms with young students
(kindergarten), furthermore, open spaces tend to allow, if not invite, physical movement of children—a feature that
you may consider either constructive or annoying, depending on your educational goals and the actual level of
activity that occurs.
Spatial arrangements unique to grade levels or subjects
The best room arrangement sometimes depends on the grade level or subject area of the class. If you teach in
elementary school, for example, you may need to think especially about where students can keep their daily
belongings, such as coats and lunches. In some schools, these can be kept outside the classroom—but not
necessarily. Some subjects and grade levels, furthermore, lend themselves especially well to small group
interaction, in which case you might prefer not to seat students in rows, but instead around small-group tables or
work areas. The latter arrangement is sometimes preferred by elementary teachers, but is also useful in high
schools wherever students need lots of counter space, as in some shops or art courses, or where they need to
interact, as in English as a Second Language courses (McCafferty, Jacobs, & Iddings, 2006). The key issue in
deciding between tables and rows, however, is not grade level or subject as such, but the amount of small group
interaction you want to encourage, compared to the amount of whole-group instruction. As a rule, tables make
working with peers easier, and rows make listening to the teacher more likely and group work slightly more
awkward physically.
Ironically, some teachers also experience challenges about room arrangement because they do not actually have
a classroom of their own, because they must move each day among other teachers’ rooms. “Floating” is especially
likely for specialized teachers (e.g. music teachers in elementary schools, who move from class to class) and in
schools have an overall shortage of classrooms. Floating can sometimes be annoying to the teacher, though it
actually also has advantages, such as not having to take responsibility for how other teachers’ rooms are arranged.
If you find yourself floating, it helps to consider a few key strategies, such as:
• consider using a permanent cart to move crucial supplies from room to room
• make sure that every one of your rooms has an overhead projector (do not count on using chalkboards or
computers in other teachers’ rooms)
• talk to the other teachers about having at least one shelf or corner in each room designated for your
exclusive use
Establishing daily procedures and routines
Procedures or routines are specific ways of doing common, repeated classroom tasks or activities. Examples
include checking daily attendance, dealing with students who arrive late, or granting permission to leave the
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classroom for an errand. Academically related procedures include ways of turning in daily homework (e.g. putting it
on a designated shelf at a particular time), of gaining the teacher’s attention during quiet seat work (e.g. raising
your hand and waiting), and of starting a “free choice” activity after completing a classroom assignment.
Procedures serve the largely practical purpose of making activities and tasks flow smoothly—a valuable and
necessary purpose in classrooms, where the actions of many people have to be coordinated within limited time and
space. As such, procedures are more like social conventions than like moral expectations. They are only indirectly
about what is ethically right or ethically desirable to do (Turiel, 2006). Most procedures or routines can be
accomplished in more than one way, with only minor differences in outcomes. There is more than one way, for
example, for the procedure of taking attendance: the teacher could call the role, delegate a student to call the role,
or note students’ presence on a seating chart. Each variation accomplishes essentially the same task, and the choice
may be less important than the fact that the class coordinates its actions somehow, by committing to some sort of
choice.
For teachers, of course, an initial management task is to establish procedures and routines as promptly as
possible. Because of the conventional quality of procedures, some teachers find that it works well simply to
announce and explain key procedures without inviting much discussion from students (“Here is how we will choose
partners for the group work”). Other teachers prefer to invite input from students when creating procedures (asking
the class, “What do you feel is the best way for students to get my attention during a quiet reading time?”). Both
approaches have advantages as well as disadvantages. Simply announcing key procedures saves time and insures
consistency in case you teach more than one class (as you would in high school). But it puts more responsibility on
the teacher to choose procedures that are truly reasonable and practical. Inviting students’ input, on the other
hand, can help students to become aware of and committed to procedures, but at the cost of requiring more time to
settle on them. It also risks creating confusion if you teach multiple classes, each of which adopts different
procedures. Whatever approach you choose, of course, they have to take into account any procedures or rules
imposed by the school or school district as a whole. A school may have a uniform policy about how to record daily
attendance, for example, and that policy may determine, either partly or completely, how you take attendance with
your particular students.
Establishing classroom rules
Unlike procedures or routines, rules express standards of behavior for which individual students need to take
responsibility. Although they are like procedures in that they sometimes help in insuring the efficiency of classroom
tasks, they are really about encouraging students to be responsible for learning and showing respect for each other.
Exhibit 8 lists a typical set of classroom rules.
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• Treat others with courtesy and politeness.
• Make sure to bring required materials to class and to activities.
• Be on time for class and other activities.
• Listen to the teacher and to others when they are speaking.
• Follow all school rules.
Exhibit 8: Sample set of classroom rules
Note three things about the examples in Exhibit 8. One is that the rules are not numerous; the table lists only
five. Most educational experts recommend keeping the number of rules to a minimum in order to make them easier
to remember (Thorson, 2003; Brophy, 2004). A second feature is that they are stated in positive terms (“Do X…”)
rather than negative terms (“Do not do Y…”), a strategy that emphasizes and clarifies what students should do
rather than what they should avoid. A third feature is that each rule actually covers a collection of more specific
behaviors. The rule “Bring all materials to class”, for example, covers bringing pencils, paper, textbooks, homework
papers, and permission slips—depending on the situation. As a result of their generality, rules often have a degree
of ambiguity that sometimes requires interpretation. Infractions may occur that are marginal or “in a grey area”,
rather than clear cut. A student may bring a pen, for example, but the pen may not work properly. You may
therefore wonder whether this incident is really a failure to follow the rule, or just an unfortunate (and in this case
minor) fault of the pen manufacturer.
As with classroom procedures, rules can be planned either by the teacher alone, or by the teacher with advice
from students. The arguments for each approach are similar to the arguments for procedures: rules “laid on” by the
teacher may be more efficient and consistent, and in this sense more fair, but rules influenced by the students may
be supported more fully by the students. Because rules focus strongly on personal responsibility, however, there is a
stronger case for involving students in making them than in making classroom procedures (Brookfield, 2006;
Kohn, 2006). In any case the question of who plans classroom rules is not necessarily an either/or choice. It is
possible in principle to impose certain rules on students (for example, “Always be polite to each other”) but let the
students determine the consequences for violations of certain rules (for example, “If a student is discourteous to a
classmate, he/she must apologize to the student in writing”). Some mixture of influences is probably inevitable, in
fact, if only because the class needs to take into account your own moral commitments as the teacher as well as any
imposed by the school (like “No smoking in the school” or “Always walk in the hallways”).
Pacing and structuring lessons and activities
One of the best ways to prevent management problems is by pacing and structuring lessons or activities as
smoothly and continuously as possible. This goal depends on three major strategies:
• selecting tasks or activities at an appropriate level of difficulty for your students
• providing a moderate level of structure or clarity to students about what they are supposed to do, especially
during transitions between activities
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• keeping alert to the flow and interplay of behaviors for the class as a whole and for individuals within it.
Each strategy presents special challenges to teachers, but also opportunities for helping students to learn.
Choosing tasks at an appropriate level of difficulty
As experienced teachers know and as research has confirmed, students are most likely to engage with learning
when tasks are of moderate difficulty, neither too easy nor too hard and therefore neither boring nor frustrating
(Britt, 2005). Finding the right level of difficulty, however, can be a challenge if you have little experience teaching a
particular grade level or curriculum, or even if students are simply new to you and their abilities unknown. Whether
familiar or not, members of any class are likely to have diverse skills and readiness–a fact that makes it challenging
to determine what level of difficulty is appropriate. A common strategy for dealing with these challenges is to begin
units, lessons, or projects with tasks that are relatively easy and familiar. Then, introduce more difficult material or
tasks gradually until students seem challenged, but not overwhelmed. Following this strategy gives the teacher a
chance to observe and diagnose students’ learning needs before adjusting content, and it gives students a chance to
orient themselves to the teacher’s expectations, teaching style, and topic of study without becoming frustrated
prematurely. Later in a unit, lesson, or project, students seem better able to deal with more difficult tasks or content
(Van Merrionboer, 2003). The principle seems to help as well with “authentic” learning tasks—ones that resemble
real-world activities, such as learning to drive an automobile or to cook a meal, and that present a variety of
complex tasks simultaneously. Even in those cases it helps to isolate and focus on the simplest subtasks first (such
as “put the key in the ignition”) and move to harder tasks only later (such as parallel parking).
Sequencing instruction is only a partial solution to finding the best “level” of difficulty, however, because it does
not deal with enduring individual differences among students. The fundamental challenge to teachers is to
individualize or differentiate instruction fully: to tailor it not only to the class as a group, but to the lasting
differences among members of the class. One way to approach this sort of diversity, obviously, is to plan different
content or activities for different students or groups of students. While one group works on Task A, another group
works on Task B; one group works on relatively easy math problems, for example, while another works on harder
ones. Differentiating instruction in this way complicates a teacher’s job, but it can be done, and has in fact been
done by many teachers (it also makes teaching more interesting!). In the next chapter, we describe some classroom
management strategies that help with such multi-tasking.
Providing moderate amounts of structure and detail
Chances are that at some point in your educational career you have wished that a teacher would clarify or
explain an assignment more fully, and perhaps give it a clearer structure or organization. Students’ desire for clarity
is especially common with assignments that are by nature open-ended, such as long essays, large projects, or
creative works. Simply being told to “write an essay critiquing the novel”, for example, leaves more room for
uncertainty (and worry) than being given guidelines about what questions the essay should address, what topics or
parts it should have, and what its length or style should be (Chesebro, 2003). As you might suspect, some students
desire clarity more than others, and improve their performance especially much when provided with plenty of
structure and clarity. Students with certain kinds of learning difficulties, in particular, often learn effectively and
stay on task only if provided with somewhat explicit, detailed instructions about the tasks expected of them (Marks,
et al., 2003).
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As a teacher, the challenge is to accommodate students’ need for clarity without making guidance so specific or
detailed that students do little thinking for themselves. As a (ridiculously extreme) example, consider a teacher
gives “clear” instructions for an essay by announcing not only exactly which articles to read and cite in the essay and
which topics or issues to cover, but even requires specific wording of sentences in their essays. This much specificity
may reduce students’ uncertainties and make the teacher’s task of evaluating the essays relatively straightforward
and easy. But it also reduces or even eliminates the educational value of the assignment—assuming, of course, that
its purpose is to get students to think for themselves.
Ideally, then, structure should be moderate rather than extreme. There should be just enough to give students
some sense of direction and to stimulate more accomplishment than if they worked with less structure or guidance.
This ideal is an application of Vygotsky’s idea of the zone of proximal development that we discussed in Chapter 2: a
place (figuratively speaking) where students get more done with help than without it. The ideal amount of guidance
—the “location” of the zone of proximal development—varies with the assignment and the student, and it
(hopefully) decreases over time for all students. One student may need more guidance to do his or her best in math,
but less guidance in order to write her or his best essay. Another student may need the reverse. But if all goes well,
both students may need less at the end of the year than at the beginning.
Managing transitions
Transitions between activities is often full of distractions and “lost” time, and is a time when inappropriate
behaviors are especially likely to occur. Part of the problem is intrinsic to transitions: students may have to wait
before a new activity actually begins, and therefore get bored at the very moment when the teacher is preoccupied
with arranging materials for the new activity. From the point of view of the students, transitions may seem
essentially like unsupervised group time, when seemingly any behavior is tolerated.
Minimizing such problems requires two strategies, one of which is easier to implement than the other. The
easier strategy is for you, as teacher, to organize materials as well as possible ahead of time, so that you minimize
the time needed to begin a new activity. The advice sounds simple, and mostly is, but it sometimes takes a bit of
practice to implement smoothly. When one of us (Kelvin) first began teaching university, for example, particular
papers or overhead transparencies sometimes got lost in the wrong folder in spite of Kelvin's efforts to keep them
where they were easy to find. The resulting delays about finding them slowed the pace of class and caused
frustrations.
A second, more complex strategy is to teach students ways to manage their own behavior during transitions
(Marzano & Marzano, 2004). If students talk too loudly at these times, for example, then discuss with them what
constitutes appropriate levels or amounts of talk, and discuss the need for them to monitor their own sound level.
Or if students stop work early in anticipation of ending an activity, then talk about—or even practice—waiting for a
signal from yourself to indicate the true ending point for an activity. If certain students continue working beyond
the end of an activity. On the other hand, try giving them warning of the impending end in advance, and remind
them about to take responsibility for actually finishing work once they hear the advance warning, and so on. The
point of these tactics is to encourage responsibility for behavior during transitions, and thereby reduce your own
need to monitor students at that crucial time.
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None of these ideas, of course, mean that you, as teacher, should give up monitoring students’ behavior entirely.
Chances are that you still will need to notice if and when someone talks too loudly, finishes too early, or continues
too long, and you will still need to give some students appropriate reminders. But the amount of reminding will be
less to the extent that students can remind and monitor themselves—a welcome trend at any time, but especially
during transitions.
Maintaining the flow of activities
A lot of classroom management is really about keeping activities flowing smoothly, both during individual
lessons and across the school day. The trouble is that there is never just “one” event happening at a time, even if
only one activity has been formally planned and is supposed to be occurring. Imagine, for example, that everyone is
supposed to be attending a single whole-class discussion on a topic; yet individual students will be having different
experiences at any one moment. Several students may be listening and contributing comments, for example, but a
few others may be planning what they want to say next and ignoring the current speakers, still others may be
ruminating about what a previous speaker said, and still others may be thinking about unrelated matters--the
restroom, food, or sex. Things get even more complicated if the teacher deliberately plans multiple activities: in that
case some students may interact with the teacher, for example, while others do work in an unsupervised group or
work independently in a different part of the room. How is a teacher to keep activities flowing smoothly in the face
of such variety?
A common mistake of beginning teachers in multi-faceted settings like these is to pay too much attention to any
one activity, student, or small group, at the expense of noticing and responding to all the others. If you are helping a
student on one side of the room when someone on the other side disturbs classmates with off-task conversation, it
can be less effective either to finish with the student you are helping before attending to the disruption, or to
interrupt yourself to solve the disruption on the other side of the room. Although one of these responses may be
necessary, either one involves disruption somewhere. There is a risk that either the student’s chatting may spread
to others, or the interrupted student may become bored with waiting for the teacher’s attention and wander off-task
herself.
A better solution, though one that at first may seem challenging, is to attend to both events at once—a strategy
that was named withitness in a series of now-classic research studies several decades ago (Kounin, 1970).
Withitness does not mean that you focus on all simultaneous activities with equal care, but only that you remain
aware of multiple activities, behaviors, and events to some degree. At a particular moment, for example, you may be
focusing on helping a student, but in some corner of your mind you also notice when chatting begins on the other
side of the room. You have, as the saying goes, “eyes in the back of your head”. Research has found that experienced
teachers are much more likely to show withitness than inexperienced teachers, and that these qualities are
associated with managing classrooms successfully (Emmer & Stough, 2001).
Simultaneous awareness—withitness—makes possible responses to the multiple events that are immediate and
nearly simultaneous—what educators sometimes called overlapping. The teacher’s responses to each event or
behavior need not take equal time, nor even be equally noticeable to all students. If you are helping one student
with seat work at the precise moment when another student begins chatting off-task, for example, a quick glance to
the second student may be enough to bring the second one back to the work at hand, and may scarcely interrupt
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your conversation with the first student, or be noticed by others who are not even involved. The result is a smoother
flow to activities overall.
As a new teacher, you may find that withitness and overlapping develop more easily in some situations than in
others. It may be easier to keep an eye (or ear) on multiple activities during familiar routines, such as taking
attendance, but harder to do the same during activities that are unfamiliar or complex, such as introducing a new
topic or unit that you have never taught before. But skill at broadening your attention does increase with time and
practice. It helps to keep trying. Merely demonstrating to students that you are “withit”, in fact, even without
making deliberate overlapping responses, can sometimes deter students from off-task behavior. Someone who is
tempted to pass notes in class, for example, might not do so because she believes that you will probably notice her
doing it anyway, whether or not you are able to notice in fact.
Communicating the importance of learning and of positive behavior
Altogether, the factors we have discussed—arranging space, procedures, and rules, and developing withitness—
help communicate an important message: that in the classroom learning and positive social behavior are priorities.
In addition, teachers can convey this message by offering timely feedback to students about performance, by
keeping accurate records of the performance, and by deliberately communicating with parents or caregivers about
their children and about class activities.
Communicating effectively is so important for all aspects of teaching, in fact, that we discuss it more fully later in
this book (see Chapter 8,“The nature of classroom communication”). Here we focus on only one of its important
aspects: how communication contributes to a smoothly functioning classroom and in this way helps prevent
behavior problems.
Giving timely feedback
The term feedback, when used by educators, refers to responses to students about their behavior or
performance. Feedback is essential if students are to learn and if they are to develop classroom behavior that is
socially skilled and “mature”. But feedback can only be fully effective if offered as soon as possible, when it is still
relevant to the task or activity at hand (Reynolds, 1992). A score on a test is more informative immediately after a
test than after a six-month delay, when students may have forgotten much of the content of the test. A teacher’s
comment to a student about an inappropriate, off-task behavior may not be especially welcome at the moment the
behavior occurs, but it can be more influential and informative then; later, both teacher and student will have
trouble remembering the details of the off-task behavior, and in this sense may literally “not know what they are
talking about”. The same is true for comments about a positive behavior by a student: hearing a compliment right
away makes it easier to the comment with the behavior, and allows the compliment to influence the student more
strongly. There are of course practical limits to how fast feedback can be given, but the general principle is clear:
feedback tends to work better when it is timely.
The principle of timely feedback is consistent, incidentally, with a central principle of operant conditioning
discussed in Chapter 2: reinforcement works best when it follows a to-be-learned operant behavior closely (Skinner,
1957). In this case a teacher’s feedback serves as a form of reinforcement. The analogy is easiest to understand when
the feedback takes the form of praise; in operant conditioning terms, the reinforcing praise then functions like a
“reward”. When feedback is negative, it functions as an “aversive stimulus” (in operant terms), shutting down the
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behavior criticized. At other times, though, criticism can also function as an unintended reinforcement. This
happens, for example, if a student experiences criticism as a reduction in isolation and therefore as in increase in
his importance in the class—a relatively desirable change. So the inappropriate behavior continues, or even
increases, contrary to the teacher's intentions. Exhibit 9 diagrams this sequence of events.
Example of Unintended Negative Reinforcement in the Classroom:
Student is isolated socially → Student publiclymisbehaves → Student gains others'
attention
Reinforcement can happen in class if an undesirable behavior, leads to a less aversive state for a student.
Social isolation can be reduced by public misbehavior, which stimulates attention that is reinforcing.
Ironically, the effort to end misbehavior ends up stimulating the misbehavior.
Exhibit 9: Attracting attention as negative reinforcement
Maintaining accurate records
Although timeliness in responding to students can sometimes happen naturally during class, there are also
situations where promptness depends on having organized key information ahead of time. Obvious examples are
the scores, marks, and grades returned to students for their work. A short quiz (such as a weekly spelling test) may
be possible to return quite soon after the quiz—sometimes you or even the students themselves can mark it during
class. More often, though, assignments and tests require longer processing times: you have to read, score, or add
comments to each paper individually. Excessive time to evaluate students' work can reduce the usefulness of a
teacher’s evaluations to students when she finally does return the work (Black, et al., 2004). During the days or
weeks waiting for a test or assignment to be returned, students are left without information about the quality or
nature of their performance; at the extreme they may even have to complete another test or do another assignment
before getting information about an earlier one. (Perhaps you yourself have experienced this particular problem!)
Delays in providing feedback about academic performance can never be eliminated entirely, but they can be
reduced by keeping accurate, well-organized records of students’ work. A number of computer programs are
available to help with this challenge; if your school does not already have one in use, then there are several
downloadable either free or at low cost from the Internet (e.g.
<http://dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Educational/Teachers_Help/Gradebooks/>). Describing these is beyond
the scope of this book. For now we simply emphasize that grading systems benefit students’ learning the most when
they provide feedback as quickly and frequently as possible (McMillan, 2001), precisely the reason why accurate,
well-organized record-keeping is important to keep.
Accurate records are helpful not only for scores on tests, quizzes, or assignments, but also for developing
descriptive summaries of the nature of students’ academic skills or progress. A common way to develop a
description is the student portfolio, which is a compilation of the student’s work and on-going assessments of it
created by the teacher or in some cases by the student (Moritz & Christie, 2005; White, 2005). To know how a
student’s science project evolved from its beginning, for example, a teacher and student can keep a portfolio of lab
notes, logs, preliminary data, and the like. To know how a student’s writing skills developed, they could keep a
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portfolio of early drafts on various writing assignments. As the work accumulates, the student can discuss it with
the teacher, and write brief reflections on its strengths thus far or on the steps needed to improve the work further.
By providing a way to respond to work as it evolves, and by including students in making the assessments,
portfolios provide relatively prompt feedback, and in any case provide it sooner than by waiting for the teacher to
review work that is complete or final.
Communicating with parents and caregivers
Since parents and caregivers in a sense “donate” their children to schools (at least figuratively speaking),
teachers are responsible for keeping them informed and involved to whatever extent is practical. Virtually all
parents understand and assume that schools are generally intended for learning. Detailed communication can
enrich parents' understanding, of how learning is addressed with their particular child’s classroom, and show them
more precisely what their particular child is doing. The better such understanding in turn encourages parents and
caregivers to support their child’s learning more confidently and “intelligently”. In this sense it contributes
indirectly to a positive learning environment in their child’s class.
There are various ways to communicate with parents, each with advantages and limitations. Here are three
common examples:
• A regular classroom newsletter: A newsletter establishes a link with parents or caregivers with
comparatively little effort on the part of the teacher. At the beginning of the year, for example, a newsletter
can tell about special materials that students will need, important dates to remember (like professional
development days when there is no school), or about curriculum plans for the next few weeks. But
newsletters also have limitations. They can seem impersonal, and they may get lost on the way home and
never reach parents or caregivers. They can also be impractical for teachers with multiple classes, as in high
school or in specialist subjects (like music or physical education), where each class follows a different
program or curriculum.
• Telephone calls: The main advantage of phoning is its immediacy and individuality. Teacher and parent or
caregiver can talk about a particular student, behavior, or concern, and do it now. By the same token,
however, phone calls are not an efficient way for informing parents about events or activities that affect
everyone in common. The individuality of phoning may explain why teachers often use this method when a
student has a problem that is urgent or unusual—as when he has failed a test, missed classes, or
misbehaved seriously. Rightly or wrongly, a student’s successes tend not to prompt phone calls to the
student’s home (though in fairness students may be more likely to tell parents about their successes
themselves, making it less essential for the teacher to do so).
• Parent-teacher conferences: Most schools schedule periodic times—often a day or evening per term—when
teachers meet briefly with parents or caregivers who wish to meet. Under good conditions, the conferences
have the individuality of phone calls, but also the richness of communication possible only in face-to-face
meetings. Since conferences are available to all parents, they need not focus on behavior or academic
problems, but often simply help to build rapport and understanding between parents or caregivers and the
teacher. Sometimes too, particularly at younger grade levels, teachers involve students in leading their own
conferences; the students display and explain their own work using a portfolio or other archive of
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accumulated materials (Benson & Barnett, 2005; Stiggins & Chappuis, 2005). In spite of all of these
advantages, though, parent-teacher conferences have limitations. Some parents cannot get to conferences
because of work schedules, child care, or transportation problems. Others may feel intimated by any school-
sponsored event because they speak limited English or because they remember painful experiences from
their own school days.
Even if you make several efforts to communicate, some parents may remain out of contact. In these cases it is
important to remember that the parents may not be indifferent to their child or to the value of education. Other
possibilities exist, as some of our comments above imply: parents may have difficulties with child care, for example,
have inconvenient work schedules, or feel self-conscious about their own communication skills (Stevens &
Tollafield, 2003). Even so, there are ways to encourage parents who may be shy, hesitant, or busy. One is to think
about how they can assist the school even from home—for example, by making materials to be used in class or (if
they are comfortable using English) phoning other parents about class events. A second way is to have a specific
task for the parents in mind—one with clear structure, such as photocopying materials to be used by students later.
A third is to remember to encourage, support, and respect the parents’ presence and contributions when they do
show up at school functions. Keep in mind that parents are experts about their own particular children, and without
them, you would have no students to teach!
Responding to student misbehavior
So far we have focused on preventing behaviors that are inappropriate or annoying. The advice has all been pro-
active or forward-looking: plan classroom space thoughtfully, create reasonable procedures and rules, pace lessons
and activities appropriately, and communicate the importance of learning clearly. Although we consider these ideas
important, it would be naïve to imply they are enough to prevent all behavior problems. For various reasons,
students sometimes still do things that disrupt other students or interrupt the flow of activities. At such moments
the challenge is not about long-term planning but about making appropriate, but prompt responses. Misbehaviors
left alone can be contagious, a process educators sometimes call the ripple effect (Kounin, 1970). Chatting
between two students, for example, can gradually spread to six students; rudeness by one can eventually become
rudeness by several; and so on. Because of this tendency, delaying a response to inappropriate behavior can make
the job of getting students back on track harder than responding to it as immediately as possible.
There are many ways to respond to inappropriate behaviors, of course, and they vary in how much they focus on
the immediate behavior compared to longer-term features or patterns of a student’s behavior. There are so many
ways to respond, in fact, that we can describe only a sample of the possibilities here. None are effective all of the
time, though all do work at least some of the time. We start with a response that may not seem on the surface like a
remedy at all—simply ignoring misbehaviors.
Ignoring misbehaviors
A lot of misbehaviors are not important or frequent enough to deserve any response at all. They are likely to
disappear (or extinguish, in behaviorist terms) simply if left alone. If a student who is usually quiet during class
happens to whisper to a neighbor once in awhile, it is probably less disruptive and just as effective to ignore the
infraction than to respond to it. Some misbehaviors may not be worth a response even if they are frequent, as long
as they do not seem to bother others. Suppose, for example, that a certain student has a habit of choosing quiet
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