MOOCs and Self-Motivated Learning

 Macie Hall: http://ii.library.jhu.edu/tag/mooc/

The buzz over Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) is more like a deep rumble. That anyone with an internet connection can freely access quality learning resources on sites such as Coursera, Udacity, and Khan Academy foretells lasting revelations about education and learning. I use the term revelation advisedly, because I think despite everything we will find out, schools may well continue plodding on their current course. Part of what is revealed, after all, is that schooling is not centered on student learning.

There is an online resource for learning nearly anything taught in schools readily available right now. Entrepreneurs clamber over what this means, but educators’ responses range from Luke-warm attempts at supplementing what they already do to outright opposition. Here is what we can say with certainty: the access to resources for learning what is taught in schools has increased dramatically. There is no evidence, however, that this increased access has led to proportional gains in student learning.  That discrepancy demands an explanation. We can no longer claim that lack of access is the limiting factor preventing gains in student learning. Let’s compare student learning to a fire. There was a time when we might have proposed that the fire was smoldering because it lacked oxygen. Now we have the internet – a giant, oxygen-blowing machine. We should expect fire anywhere there is fuel. If only young people would burn to learn.

Pardon the analogy. What is revealed by the relative lack of learning gains in a world awash with learning opportunity is a lack of student motivation. Let’s face it; there is no barrier preventing the sufficiently motivated person from learning what is of value. That is a fraught statement for people who dedicate their lives, as many educators do, to enabling young people to overcome obstacles and achieve at the highest possible levels. Yet pretending that we (educators) still provide what is necessary for a young person to learn is just that – enabling.  We enable students to continue to repel responsibility for their own learning.

If a young person really needed to know how to do something, why would she require convincing? We don’t have to convince babies to learn to walk, or toddlers to learn oral language. Literacy and numeracy will develop without institutionalized coercion to the extent those skills have value for the people in whom they develop. Of course people learn things at school that they would not on their own, and in the past some learning resources were only available through schools. That has been a good enough reason to compel everyone to go to school. We are right to do everything in our power to make whatever resources are available to some available to all. My argument is that we overreach when we go beyond providing equal opportunity. We overreach when we crowd out the self-motivation of a young person by assuming responsibility for her.

If you are still reading, perhaps my heretical position hasn’t put you off too much to consider this illustrative example, taken from prior conversations with Fran -- a (the) frequent commenter to this blog. Fran went through a teacher preparation program in Louisville KY (as did I), student taught, and then took on a middle school math teaching position. He quit mid-semester, and for the past several years has worked at his own surface restoration business. Fran continues in his mission to help young people, though. He volunteers daily at the Americana Community Center in Louisville’s diverse south end, where he tutors kids during “homework help” and coaches a middle schools girls’ basketball team.

Fran has been interested in this blog because he struggles over his role in motivating the kids he helps. Fran’s issue can be characterized by his interactions with one particular fifth-grader, we’ll call her Alma. Alma’s family arrived in Louisville several years ago along with a wave of refugees from Somalia. Alma (tellingly) has readily learned English, and communication is not an issue. She comes to homework help where she sits with Fran to complete her math homework. The tendency, he says, is for her to want him to show her how to work the problems by working the problems. Fran does the things that teachers and tutors should, such as showing Alma how to work similar problems and/or asking Alma to work on her own through the steps she is able and then use Fran only for “hurdle help.” Both of them find this time-consuming and frustrating, though. What Alma wants is to get the homework done, so she can get credit for it. What Fran wants for Alma is for her to build the repertoire of skills that will help her to complete her math assignments on her own.

Fran has pointedly asked me what incentives he could provide Alma so that she would want to learn the math, not just to complete the math assignments. He is familiar with Khan Academy, a full set of video tutorials and practice problems available online. The site provides the structure and feedback needed for self-paced learning of math skills from basic arithmetic to advanced calculus. He enrolled Alma on the site, and he registered himself as her coach. At first Alma seemed to enjoy working on Khan Academy. She raced through several concepts with which she was already familiar. She also looked at the section of the site devoted to pre-calculus and asked Fran about it. He told her that working those problems would require many prior steps and a lot of time. Alma quickly lost interest.

My explanation: learning pre-calculus isn’t a felt necessity for Alma. Yes, eventually she will take tests in school to demonstrate her proficiency in pre-calculus, and those may have real consequences for her, but she can’t feel that. Fran knows about those long-term consequences, and he can try to insert his own short-term contrivances to substitute for what she can’t feel. This involves a major hazard though, the same one we have in schools that perform essentially the same function. The best case is that Alma does the work for the contrivance (to get credit, to please the teacher, to get the treat, etc). In that case Alma’s motivation depends on those contrived rewards.  Take them away and there is no reason left to learn.

Online learning resources generally lack the personalized rewards that schools can contrive. Khan Academy has implemented an automated set of badges as token rewards for achievement. It is hard for me to see how badges could be valued enough to motivate young people to do something they wouldn’t otherwise do. Young people need their own reasons for achievement.

I am literally writing a book in which I try to advise Fran on what he can do to support Alma’s aspirations He and other educators can play an important role without crowding out self-motivation. We have to build on what kids like Alma want for themselves. What Alma wants is to know who she is. That involves defining those things with which she identifies and also distinguishing those things that set her apart. Fran can help in that process, though he has to be careful not to put himself in her place. He can facilitate a group, for example, that Alma may want to join. Similar to a school sponsored club, Fran can help handle the logistics of a group that values math skills – like a math competition team. To the extent that members of the team want to fit in by becoming better at math, and/or standout by surpassing other teams, Fran may be able to help create an environment in which Alma is motivated to improve her math skills.

For a more detailed treatment of this topic you’ll have to wait for my forthcoming book [proposed title: Crowded Motivation: Stepping Aside to Support the Highest Aspirations of Young People]. What has become clear with the growth of online resources for learning is that schools can no longer even pretend to be mostly about student learning. What educators currently do, and perhaps have always done, is give young people a place to declare who they are. Perhaps the most important part of our work is knowing when to stay out of the way.

Whose Horse in the Race?

Among the many pitfalls of high stakes testing, the one that troubled me the most when I was teaching high school (in Kentucky) was misplaced accountability. My students’ performance on annual Commonwealth Accountability Tests (CATS) had real consequences for me, but not for my students. Teachers and schools were assessed, and actions taken,  based on student scores. What difference did the score make for the student? Scores weren’t used to determine advancement or placement. We couldn’t have used the scores to determine grades, the test scores weren’t released in time. Teachers and schools may have created ways to incentivize performance, but there weren’t any natural consequences to students built into the testing program. Begun in 1999, the explicit purpose of the CATS testing was to hold all schools accountable to achieve at least a pre-designated proficiency target score by 2014.

Are they going to make it? Well, if you set a goal and see you aren’t going to make it, it’s a lot simpler to change the goal than to change what you are doing. The CATS tests were completely overhauled in 2007, making it impossible to compare scores before and after that change. CATS was dropped completely for 2011. And so goes the trajectory of every major reform that moves accountability away from students. I’m reminded of a cartoon I saw when I was teaching that stuck with me. An angry father is looking at a low test score his son has brought home and says: “Son, I am very disappointed... in your teacher.” I’m sure I chuckled when I first saw it, but the effect of removing responsibility is serious -- moral -- stuff. When the community in which a child is developing says, in effect, someone else is responsible, then he will feel relieved of that obligation and his efforts will reflect that.

Is that true? Do student scores on tests correlate with the consequences of the test for the student? In a previous post I cited a recent study by ETS called Motivation Matters in which a proficiency test was given to three groups of college students each with a different consent form. The group given a consent form that said, in effect, your score on this test will affect your future employment did significantly better than the group given a consent form that said scores would be kept confidential. It makes sense: if the score matters to the student she will work harder. Of course I felt this teaching school. My job became about motivating students to do well on the test -- because there were no intrinsic reasons for students to do well. How I would have liked to merely help students see the direct relationship between their performance and their own future goal -- if only there had been such a relationship!

Most frustrating of all, the more I pushed as a teacher, the less reason my students had for taking responsibility themselves. If it was my horse in the race, why should my students worry over it? This brings me to another very recently published study. This large, well conducted study at representative colleges found what, at first blush, is a surprising relationship. Students whose parents paid more toward college had lower GPAs than those whose parents paid less. The careful and thorough analysis came to this conclusion: students who had to pay more had a horse in the race. OK, those are my words, but the conclusion boiled down to the student having a greater or lesser stake in the outcome of each class she took. Now to be fair, the study revealed a seemingly opposite relationship between graduation rates and parental investment. You can sort through the fine print in the article itself. Suffice to say I don’t think this finding undermines the conclusion that students who have a greater stake in the outcome will perform better. In my previous post I went so far as to suggest that we might more accurately think of tests as measuring motivation than as measuring skills or knowledge. The same, I think, goes for GPAs. If we look closely I think we’ll find that student GPA tracks more closely with motivation than with skills and knowledge. If only I was sufficiently motivated to do the study!

I Need an Intervention

First semester freshman year of college was a real wake-up call. It wasn’t obvious how to handle the sudden and new found freedoms. The open blocks of time were an invitation to feel at ease -- there would be plenty of time later. Presently we could play games -- frisbee in daylight and ping pong at night. I certainly attended class -- though not everyone did. No one was making us do anything. It turned out that attendance wasn’t enough. I did not do well on the calculus and chemistry exams. About two-thirds of the way through the semester it hit me: I needed an intervention. I sought help. I dropped the calculus class. I enrolled in small group chemistry tutoring that would allow me to take an incomplete in chemistry. I ended that first semester having only completed two courses. When my coach, having been alerted to my academic struggles, expressed concern, I reassured him that I had a plan to get back on track. He didn’t mention it again. He didn’t have to. He had been around, after all, and had seen this plenty of times before.

Successful college students who struggled at first must have changed something. Otherwise they would not have gone on to be successful college students. Many do like I did -- they seek help to make a plan and get back on track. Colleges offer help in many forms including tutors, learning centers, support groups, mentors, etc. We don’t doubt that these interventions help. Students who seek them out do improve. But why are these programs effective?

I just returned from a Lilly conference with the theme “evidenced-based learning and teaching.” The onus was on presenters (including me) to show, with data, the effect of our efforts. I attended many rich and engaging sessions, including one by Saundra McQuire from LSU. Her career has consisted primarily of teaching chemistry though in recent years she has worked with students at LSU’s Center for Academic Success (CAS). I thoroughly enjoyed the presentation which was about teaching metacognitive strategies to students. Dr. McGuire radiates positivity. So of course I didn’t raise my hand to object to the major flaw in her presentation. Folks around me were enjoying her as much as I was. I have no doubt that she is well loved by the students, staff and faculty around her. I am sure that the CAS is an important component of student success at LSU. Still. It isn’t fair to use data showing student improvement after an intervention as evidence that the intervention caused the improvement. The evidence for why we should teach students particular metacognitive strategies, Dr. McGuire suggested, was because students who were taught these did better afterward.

To which I wanted to say: of course they did. Your sample of students was self-selected to be those who, faced with an eye-opening problem, sought help to address the problem and do better. Nearly any intervention, so long as it is reasonably well intentioned, is likely to show a similar kind of success -- because people chose it who were poised to improve. This doesn’t defeat the purpose of having learning centers (or tutors, or study groups, etc), but it does suggest we ought to be careful about what we claim when we measure the effectiveness of such interventions -- and to whom we attribute responsibility for student success.

"Thatta Boy" Better Than Cash?

I had to wait for it, but my twelve-year old finally started a real conversation with me about school work. He had written a persuasive essay about whether or not students should get paid for good grades. He asked me to read his draft. Naturally I was quite interested. He argued the con, citing the incentive to cheat. We talked about that. Cheating is bad, he thought, an unintended consequence of paying for grades that detours kids around the purpose of school. Getting paid for grades puts the emphasis on the wrong thing, I thought, namely getting a high grade instead of learning something new. If grades or for that matter test scores are what we care about, then why not utilize any means at our disposal for getting good grades or high test scores? In his notes he held the trump card that effectively combined our two points of view. It was a quote he found from a 2008 editorial by Diane Ravitch on Forbes.com. In it she contrasts the intrinsic motivation of those in India to the extrinsic motivation of Americans, and concludes: "Does the future belong to those who struggle to better themselves, make sacrifices to do so and work hard? Or to those who must be cajoled and bribed to learn anything at all?" 

If you scour the internet (as I have just done) to try and decide the issue you will find ample support that paying kids to get good grades is a bad idea. The arguments boil down to this: young people need to develop the intrinsic motivation to learn. While I agree, I also sense a kind of moral undercurrent. I think people have a gut reaction about paying kids for grades -- that it is wrong because kids ought to be pursuing education for loftier reasons.

But think about this more deeply. What else (and I'm talking to everyone EXCEPT the student) have you got to offer? If you are trying to get a kid to do something he wouldn't do on his own (and what else would be the point of education?), what kind of leverage do you have? Isn't anything you offer a reward of some kind -- and not so different from offering money? Most all schools assign grades. How are grades different from monetary rewards? Many families probably do the math anyway, estimating the added (monetary) value to future careers of good grades now. 

Perhaps the most innocuous reward is attention of some kind from the teacher. Need a chart of rewarding phrases? Here's a link to 275 ways to say "good job!" If kids do it so that you'll say "good job" or some variant, how is that different from doing it so you'll give them 10 cents? What do we really mean by "intrinsic motivation?" The idea seems easy: wanting to do something without the need for any external reward, but what does that mean? Don't we ultimately do everything for something? You might like to read for its own sake, but doesn't that just mean that you get a little boost of some pleasure chemical in your brain when you read? Meaning that you still do the activity for a reward -- it just happens to be a chemical reward. Cash rewards come from "outside," but isn't cash ultimately convertible to deeply intrinsic interests -- meaning kids can spend cash on things of value to them?

What do you think?

Training Effects

One of the bedrock principles of training is that it is specific. A demand is imposed on the system and the system, to the extent it is ready and able, adapts to that demand. To train for an endurance event, for example, I can perform a series of tasks that demand higher-than-normal energy production. The human body is very well equipped to respond to such a demand by ramping up the production of hormones and enzymes that encourage the production and storage of energy. After that series of tasks, therefore, I will have adapted to the specific demand for sustained energy. An endurance event will pose a whole variety of challenges to the athlete, however, that are considerably more complex than any single demand to which the body can adapt. In order to run a fast marathon an athlete would need additional adaptations in bony and connective tissues, cardio vascular components, neurological components, and of course muscular tissue.

Muscle tissue adapts quickly – on the order of weeks. Connective tissue adapts slowly – on the order of months. Training gains and losses therefore depend on the nature of the adaptation. They also depend on the readiness of the system to respond and adapt. Sports provide the framework for contriving and testing all manner of adaptations and for comparing the differences between people who compete. The whole premise of sports is that differences between people will demonstrably emerge.

Schooling, at its best, is training. It places demands on students who then adapt to those demands. A highly trained student is just like a highly trained athlete: they are both primed for competition.
When demonstrable differences emerge between competitors who have similar access to resources, whether athletic or academic, we attribute that to differences in talent, motivation, or a combination of the two. If we were interested in developing an Olympic training program for athletes, we might begin by trying to screen young people for talent. We would hope to reveal the people most likely to respond to very specific kinds of training for specific sports. We could administer general fitness tests to kids and get a rough measure that is likely to correlate with future responsiveness. A more refined screening instrument would probably need to include a direct measure of responsiveness, though, to specific kinds of training. For example, kids are pre-tested, given a training regimen, and then post-tested to measure the gains made through training.

Though we don’t tend to, we could look at schooling the same way. If we are interested in developing competitive thinkers in a variety of fields, we might begin by trying to screen young people for the likelihood that they will respond to specific kinds of academic training. One such screen is the IQ test. From its inception the IQ test has been designed to screen for those most likely to adapt to school generally. [Technically Alfred Binet was commissioned by the French government to screen for the converse – students who would struggle in school.] Perhaps it wasn’t worth the added expense to get the more refined result we might expect if Binet (and his successors) had directly measured how students respond to specific kinds of training.

The cost of testing is likely less of a road block than issues surrounding the concept of intelligence. Problems arise because of the inference that intelligence is fixed and that it determines academic success. Although I am unaware of any actual pronouncements that intelligence works this way, I am well aware of the constant barrage of pushback against the possibility that intelligence may be conceived of in this way. There appears to be a raft of studies seeking confirmation that intelligence is not fixed and that academic success can be achieved by all people regardless of any perceived biological constraint. And the results of studies that do not directly pertain to intelligence and academic success are combed through for any hint that people are indeed freed from the shackles of biological determinism to pursue whatever may interest them.

So I wasn’t surprised by the blog that showed up on my Scientific American News Feed titled: “Virtues of Cognitive Workout: New study reveals neurological underpinnings of intelligence.” In it, Samuel McNerney sets up his interpretation of a recent study with this narrative: “For decades researchers believed that fluid intelligence was… largely determined by genetics. The implication of [this 2008 study] suggested otherwise: with some cognitive training people could improve fluid intelligence and, therefore, become smarter.” In his review of the recent study, 17 participants trained over 3 sessions to perform a mental task that requires working memory. Not too surprisingly, these participants improved on a test of fluid intelligence that requires working memory. This finding resonated with the chorus of those building a bulwark against an imagined enemy -- biological determinism.

To me, this finding is analogous to any training effect we’d expect from tissue that adapts quickly to imposed demand. It is pretty silly to generalize from this result that we can, in effect, train anyone to accomplish whatever academic goal we happen to value, especially if the goal is to be competitive with others. Here’s the problem: among the 17 who were trained to use working memory some improved more than others. Further, working memory adapts quickly and specifically to the task imposed, which means any gains will be quickly lost once the demand is removed. The results of this study do not mean anything about the relative performance of different people on complex tasks over the course of a lifetime.

The only thing that can be said to determine success in life is motivation, and we don’t even know how to talk about what that really is, much less where comes from. I’m working on a framework to at least have an illuminating conversation about it. Stay tuned.

A letter to an old student

Here is part of a conversation I had with a former student - His question is in italics, my response is in normal font.  This student has a great interest in education but is probably going to go to med school upon graduation.

Hi there!
I wanted to check in and see how you are doing and how the family is. How many kids now? 9? 10? 
I also wanted to message you to ask for a bit of advice (as if I didn't ask for enough 8 years ago). This Fall I will begin teaching Biology at a high school (I cannot wait; living the dream) and I'm currently taking a course that's about Science pedagogy and education design, etc. The course has made me think a lot about my experiences with great teachers and terrible teachers, and I really want to hone it on what exactly it is that made teachers like you so effective and influential, and some like one of my college chem teachers so ineffective. So I figured you might be of some help. Do you have any tips from your experience? One thing I'm really interested in is how to create, control and encourage the right type of classroom environment. How do you maintain interest from your students? How do you gain their trust and respect so quickly? I'm spending a lot of time on lesson planning, but I could really use some help with the other aspects of teaching, and I thought you might have a few pointers.
Sorry this message is so disorganized. Don't rush with a response. I don't begin teaching for months.
Also, I wanted to mention that it would be really good to see you in person sometime soon. It's been far too long. I was thinking I could make the drive up to Glade Spring (that's where facebook says you are, is that right?) at some point if that would be convenient for you.
Hope to hear from you soon, and that all is well.
Best,

(name omitted)

Hey (name omitted)! This is just like you - you get to where I am in 1/20th the time:)  I am right where you are right now - doing some serious questioning, not so much of myself, but of the system that ... almost encourages... bad teaching. I am now beginning an education of sorts for myself - to try to do some good reading on what is 1) done right in other areas and 2) what is done wrong in so many schools around here. Me and a colleague are going to try to get published and then really become advocates for a change... oddly enough, guess who is also interested in such stuff and might even help us out? (name omitted - another former student, classmate of this one).... and now I might be able to hook you in too:) Nice circle of life thing. Maybe we should all write a book someday.

I am so proud of you for starting where you are starting. Not with the garbage of how to do lesson plans, etc... like there is some formula of how to be a good teacher... but you are thinking of what it is that actually makes a good teacher. That is a great place to start.  Step 2 would be for you to think about what makes a teacher ineffective.  This is all subjective, though - because you see the world through your own eyes and brain - however, there is still truth to be found if you look.

Here is what I think is good and bad about me as a teacher.

Bad: 1) I'm unorganized, 2) my lesson planning is kind of abysmal, 3) classroom management is my own style which involves a lenience bordering on chaotic at times, 4) I hate grading and give really poor feedback, and 5) I don't stick to schedules well

Good: 1) I like working with kids, 2) I believe in them, 3) I can see them the way they will be (you are a perfect example here - you are mr. ultra-successful now... but I never saw you as any different, just younger), 4) I can see boredom creeping in and I can switch direction in an instant to try to win them back (one moment we are talking about mitosis, then next we talk a bit about phantom limbs or something, then back to mitosis - this drives some students crazy, however - but its usually just the good students:), and 5) my classroom management is my own style which involves a lenience bordering on chaos.

Notice how all my flaws (in my mind) are in areas that most people think are critical to good teaching and all the good stuff is just basic human stuff?

They can't make you a great teacher. They can give you tools that will help. You already are a great teacher... just BE.  Just be ok with who you are - the good and the not so good (if not, they will definitely expose it:) Truly care about your students - some will need a great biology teacher, some will need to play ping pong with you. You only think I am something special because we connected. And you can't connect with someone if you don't care for them.

So find out about your students - create situations where you can just talk to them in small groups or individually (like labs) - don't make it about biology all the time. My main goal when I teach a class is that they don't hate it when they are done. I am only laying the groundwork so they can keep learning throughout their lives.  So I don't get all bent out of shape if some biology concepts don't resonate with them now.

And by god, have some fun. Never forget that those kids have to be in your class - you don't... even worse you get paid and they get nothing.

Ok - things to consider. 

1) You are young and cool and some of those HS girls will throw themselves at you. Society does not look kindly upon that even though the difference between you and you student's ages is probably less than many of your students parents. be aware, be honest. For instance, it would have been trickier for me to have helped you if you had been female. I've done it but its a precarious line.  Basically don't abuse or take advantage of your students... keep a clean conscience.  Step back if you need to.

2) Many teachers are burnt out because the profession is hard.. and if you aren't enjoying it... then its going to beat you down. Don't hang around those teachers too much... suck the good ideas from them and discard the rest.

3) Continually evaluate yourself and your class - every day - ask yourself what went right and what went wrong

4) DON'T JUDGE YOURSELF. You should absolutely suck this first year. embrace it, laugh at it... let it make you a little bit better next year. And when you have 17 years in like I do, you will only just kind of suck... and you will still embrace it and still laugh at it.

5) Accept yourself.  The good and the bad.  Students respond to genuine... and they are repelled by fakeness and hypocrisy.  It takes a long time to be ok with who you are - just make that the goal and keep striving for it.  And hey, if the teaching thing doesn't work out - at least you have accepted yourself:)

Ok, that should be good for now - I would love to talk with you anytime - its difficult to get away, but if you can make it to Glade anytime - you are more than welcome here! Keep in touch - as you do lesson plans, feel free to shoot me questions about what I do for certain topics - shoot me an email and I will share my google folder that has all my biology stuff in it

Good luck, old friend. Keep me posted

Steve

Preparing for Tests Undermines Long-Term Growth

The pressure is on in Virginia schools to prepare for the high stakes "Standards of Learning" tests that are coming up in a couple months. The teach-to-the-test mentality adopted by many (or most) teachers not only makes schooling unpleasant, it likely stunts the long-term academic growth of our students. I wrote a personal anecdote relating the experience of my 10 year old daughter intending to include it in this post. I've decided to save that, and many other things I've written, for a book on motivation. More about that later. In the meantime I am counting on you to contribute your own anecdotes, interpretations, and/or comments to keep this conversation interesting!

In my last post I cited a recently published study of German students who were followed from fifth to tenth grade in order to identify the factors that led to growth in math achievement over those five years. [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cdev.12036/abstract] The researchers measured intelligence, motivation, study strategies, and math skills. They concluded that growth in math skills is predicted by motivation and study strategies, not intelligence. The results were unsurprising to the researchers, whose initial hypotheses were confirmed. My post was critical, but more about the perceived implications of the study than of the study itself. I expressed my concern that motivation may not be as distinct from intelligence as we tend to think. Educators efforts to edify young people are similarly constrained by both.


An important finding of the German study that I haven't yet mentioned will help us understand one of the ways our efforts are unwittingly sabotaged. Recall that growth in math skill was predicted by intrinsic motivation, i.e., students who scored highly for intrinsic motivation showed greater gains over several years of math tests. [Intrinsic motivation was measured by self-reported questionnaire items like "I invest a lot of effort in math because I am interested in the subject."] That was expected. What was unexpected -- and most interesting -- was that these intrinsically motivated students tended to score lower on any given year. They were outperformed in the short-term by extrinsically motivated students, but they showed greater gains in the long-term. [Extrinsic motivation was measured by self-reported questionnaire items like "In math I worked hard because I wanted to get good grades."] I will quote the analysis of the researchers at length:

Students with high intrinsic motivation are less concerned about how well they perform on upcoming achievement tests. Accordingly, although intrinsic motivation should provide long-term benefits, such a non instrumental approach to learning may not add much to current performance. As for deep, elaborative learning strategies, previous studies indicated that elaborative learning may not be an efficient means of dealing with an upcoming achievement test because semantic elaboration is a relatively slow learning process and therefore costly if time is limited.

Learning is a slow, gradual, and ultimately personal process of who we become. Students who respond to short-term extrinsic motivators like grades and scores on tests may be favored by school systems under pressure to perform on annual exams. Students who are motivated to make sense of material according to their own interests may not only underperform on annual exams, but they may be disfavored by the school systems which, paradoxically, will undermine the interests of everyone in the long term.

Motivation vs Intelligence

Quick armchair experiment: Imagine you have a 12 year old boy named Johnny. You have requested a conference with his 7th grade math teacher, Mr. Smith. When you ask Mr. Smith to explain Johnny’s relatively low report card grade for math, he says that Johnny is less intelligent than others in the class. How does that make you feel?

Now imagine a nearly identical scenario with only 1 difference: substitute “motivated” for “intelligent” so that Mr. Smith’s explanation for the low grade is that Johnny is less motivated than others in the class. How does that make you feel?

If you are like me you have had plenty of parents inquire about kids’ grades, and so have already put yourself in the place of this imaginary parent. And you likely never have nor ever will attribute poor performance to lack of intelligence -- that just seems cruel! But you probably have offered something like the second explanation: that little Johnny just hasn’t put in the effort required. If he just works harder his grades will improve. That sounds so much nicer.

The difference between the two explanations -- the reason the first seems cruel and the second nice -- may seem obvious, but only given an intuitive model of intelligence and motivation that I think needs revision. According to the model intelligence describes something about a person’s biology while motivation describes something about a person’s spirit. With this model intelligence limits a person, something like a person’s height, except even more broad in the scope of things a person won’t be able to do. Motivation, on the other hand, potentially expands the person. It feels like the immaterial medium through which we transcend our physical boundaries.

I'd like to point out two good reasons to get over this model. First, any conceptual model that relies on non-natural phenomena puts itself beyond the scope of science. What research program can you design to look for the sources of motivation if it is, in essence, a non-physical trait? Second, as new data emerge they must be reconciled with our models for understanding the underlying processes at work. Brain imaging studies, for example, may produce data about motivation that need explanation. Models built on non-physical attributes will not provide the foundation needed to accommodate these data and something will be forfeited -- either the best interpretation of the data or the model that we have come to rely on.

Most of the non-scientific community is ready to forfeit the best interpretation of the data. Social-scientific studies, particularly in education, also seem determined to follow human intuition and attempt to fit the data with outdated models of human agency. The rest of this post will illustrate with a case in point.

A small buzz began to hum in the blogosphere following the December publication of a new study about the sources of improvement in understanding math. [see http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cdev.12036/abstract] The website of the British Pschological Society led with: "Being motivated could be of greater importance than intelligence when it comes to academic achievement, new research has suggested." The post continued, "the study found a young person's growth in mathematics achievement is driven more by their determination and how they study rather than how smart they are." [http://www.bps.org.uk/news/motivation-more-important-intelligence]

US News reported that "Innate intelligence -- as defined by IQ tests -- may provide a head start, but it's learning skills and determination that ultimately add up to success, according to the new research." [http://health.usnews.com/health-news/news/articles/2012/12/20/motivation-and-study-not-iq-are-keys-to-kids-math-success]

Most tellingly,Time.com posted, "You don’t have to be born with math skills; solving problems is a matter of studying and motivation." This is a welcome finding, the author contends, because "...the findings provide reassuring confirmation that academic success is not governed by a student’s cognitive abilities alone." [emphasis mine] [http://healthland.time.com/2012/12/26/motivation-not-iq-matters-most-for-learning-new-math-skills/]

Thank goodness, these posts imply, math performance depends on something besides the brain -- even if ultimately the brain has to do the work. You are born with the brain (or at least the instructions for growing it) but motivation comes from somewhere else. Someone demanding a fully naturalistic account of math performance might like to know where to find all the non-cognitive human math abilities.

The appetite for this kind of news is abundant and calls out for an explanation. One reason is that it seems to support the intuitive model that motivation and intelligence are different. This feeds into the desire that parents and teachers feel to help young people. It's hard to imagine ways to intervene to increase intelligence but easier to imagine ways to intervene to increase motivation. It likely goes even deeper, though, to the sense of personal efficacy that correlates with perception of control. When we feel that something is outside of our control -- then it is outside of our control. Conversely, to the extent we are convinced that something is within our control, we actually gain a concomitant measure of control over it.

The intuitive model of human motivation requires that it works something like Dumbo's magic feather. Both posit the need for magical source of power. The point of the story, though, was that the feather wasn't actually magic. And for Dumbo to think that flying depended on magic made his flying susceptible to what nature would ultimately reveal -- that the feather was just a feather, and what mattered was Dumbo's belief about himself.

The intuition about motivation is like Dumbo's belief about the feather. It may have served to foster a sense of self-efficacy, but we have to grow past the belief that it's source is other-worldly if our powers are to continue. Continued research in neuroscience will likely reveal that motivation is a cognitive ability just like intelligence. It is built into the brain, varies from person to person, and worst of all, levels of motivation probably remain stable within one person. I think it is likely we will learn we have no more power to intervene over intrinsic motivation than over intelligence.

That intelligence and motivation are both real and physically mediated in the brain does not need to imply that our involvement as teachers and parents is wasted. Understanding how someone processes information and how they are self-motivated gives us the tools -- perhaps the only tools -- for appropriate intervention. Discussing the intelligence of the children we work with should not be any more taboo than discussing relative levels of motivation.

Lance, Grit, and Dope(amine)

Put aside your grief for a moment and you can likely bring to mind an iconic image of Lance Armstrong driving himself toward the finish line of yet another long and grueling race. We are compelled by great athletic achievement because it shows us what is possible. Your sympathy for Armstrong may be low right now, but only obstinate denial will keep you from remembering that there was a point when he was bald, bedridden, and facing death. You may decide to cast your stones now, but who had the stones then? The greatness of a successful athlete is not due to having a true moral compass -- as we might like.  What is required of our athletes is the true grit to accomplish personal goals. Lance doped because that’s what it took to win the Tour De France. The real difference between Lance and the other riders on tour wasn’t the dope, it was the dopamine -- a chemical in the brain now implicated in motivation.

Let me suggest that what we all want -- what we need, really, to participate as persons in the world -- is the leverage to move ourselves toward what is of value. The term for that leverage is agency. Further, despite wishful thinking to the contrary, agency isn’t a birthright. We have to work for it ourselves and demand it of others. Agency is the parent of twins: freedom and responsibility. We get traction for our agency from grit. Athletes show us what grit looks like so that we can use it, in some measure, for ourselves.

Athletic pursuit operates in a specially designed microcosm so that goals are readily defined and success in easily measured. All the work that athletes put in -- all the planning, training, dieting, managing, and competing -- is rationalized by a set of explicit performance goals that generalize to “winning.” To that extent you cannot dismiss the importance of winning because it defines the index used to measure the success of all that work. We still mean it when we say “winning isn’t everything” though, because the pursuit of winning is itself in service to the greater purpose of athletics: to showcase our capacity to set and meet goals -- to prove our agency in the world.

One reason you are grief-stricken over the Lance Armstrong scandal is because the means he used to reach his goals were against the rules. Rules, however, like all other defining aspects of sports contests, are a means for establishing what competitors have to do in order to win. To a non-competitor the rule may look simple: “don’t take EPO.” That’s about as simple in bike racing as the rule: “don’t foul” is in basketball. Just like the real goal for basketball players becomes to make the greatest possible use of personal contact without getting called for a foul, the real goal for endurance cyclists is to get the most possible red blood cells without failing a drug test. Although those outside the sport are upset, my guess is that most of Armstrong’s immediate competitors at the time accepted that Lance had won at the game they had all tacitly agreed to play. Unspoken rules among athletes are subject to interpretation and change -- and of course pressure from outside. I suspect that is what is going on now.

Lance Armstrong won an unprecedented 7 Tours De France. Two questions emerge for me now that he is poised to confess his use of performance enhancing drugs. First, should these drugs be against the rules? He had to successfully take and cover up PEDs in secret for his whole career. Think what he could have accomplished if he could have used PEDs to maximum effect with the full benefit of doctors and specialists working openly! That interesting question is not the subject of this post, however. The question I’d like to consider, and I’m going to assume that most of Armstrong’s main rivals were not above doping themselves, is what set Armstrong apart? For that matter, what sets any of us apart? Even if you remain indignant and hold that Armstrong deserves no credit, will you at least concede that he was highly motivated? Lance saw where he wanted to be even when he was a long way from it. And he got there, taking large risks along the way. That’s motivation, right? I think it’s fair to say that Armstrong was sufficiently motivated to do what it took to win the Tour De France.

If you ever took a psychology class you can probably bring to mind the experiments in which rats greedily press a lever to get a morsel of food. A very general finding was that the neurotransmitter dopamine was released when the rats got the food. Dopamine is known to be integral to human experience of pleasure as well. New research continues to refine our understanding of the role of dopamine, however, and it goes a lot deeper than mediating our desires for food and sex. According to a recent study by John Salamone and Mercè Correa [The Mysterious Motivational Functions of Mesolimbic Dopamine. Neuron, 2012; 76 (3): 470 DOI:10.1016/j.neuron.2012.10.021] the neurons activated by dopamine are tasked with “behavioral activation, exertion of effort, approach behavior, sustained task engagement, Pavlovian processes, and instrumental learning.” If that sounds a little technical, I can paraphrase. Dopamine is not the chemical of reward, washing over us after the work is done, it’s the chemical of motivation -- jacking us up to do the work required. The cells that kick in with dopamine cause us to get going, to work hard, to go toward the thing we want, to stick with it, to do more of the things we find working, and to do more of the things that help us to achieve our goals. Experimental evidence suggests that dopamine circuits don’t cause us to find the destination more rewarding, they increase our willingness to do more work en route to getting there.

The neurochemistry of dopamine is important because we seek interventions for people suffering from a range of conditions from depression to addiction. At root these conditions are about motivation -- too little in the case of depression and too much in the case of addiction. A stark and unsettling implication of this research is that one could literally take the measure of the brain chemistry of any group of individuals and quantify a range of motivational states. Some people are more motivated than others. I’m sure one could similarly take the measure of a single individual over time and find a similar range of motivational states. We are more motivated at some times than at others. Biological determinism rears its ugly head. Are we just puppets pulled by the firings of nerve cells that have too much or too little of the chemical needed for motivation?

That is not the kind of question broached in the standard fare of education literature. Michael Horn authored the book Disrupting Class to describe his system for motivating young learners. In his blog on Forbes he posts this synopsis with the title: Building Motivation, Instilling Grit.” [See: http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelhorn/2013/01/10/building-motivation-instilling-grit-the-necessity-of-mastery-based-digital-learning/] In it he argues that technology now provides the means for all students to work toward mastery individually at the appropriate level and pace. All that is required is the intrinsic motivation to get there. I was right with him until he went on to describe (as the title suggests) how we should instill the grit needed into seemingly unmotivated students. How, I wanted to know, can you “instill” something and it also be intrinsic to the person? Never mind the chemistry -- whose motivation are we talking about here? If it is intrinsic, it has to be the student’s own. If the educator does the work, it was the educator who was motivated. Can a teacher work to get students to do something? Of course! Call and order pizzas for students who finish. But if that is what moved the student it was extrinsic. Remove the promise of a pizza and the student will stop working.

And before you correct me, I realize that in a real classroom the dynamic is considerably more complicated. Maybe I ordered pizzas just because I’m a nice guy and I like my students. Students like me because I’m a nice guy and because I like them. Kids do the assignment, therefore, because they like me, even if I don’t always have a pizza waiting for them. Psychoanalyzing a group of kids is fraught with peril in any case -- you can’t always know why they do what they do! The point I hoped to make is more definitional. Behavior that is motivated intrinsically doesn’t depend on someone else making you do it.

More perplexing still, Horn insists that all young people are equally motivated to pursue what is of value. The reason some students appear more motivated than others, he says,  is that schools haven’t made the case that all students should buy what schools are selling. Few things are as aggravating to me as the assumption that differences in student performance are best explained by differences in the effort of teachers and schools. That implies that improving the performance of students requires teachers and schools to be more motivated. Grit doesn’t work that way. Grit is the real traction given a person to pursue what is of value -- to him. It takes work: stepping toward the problem, confronting it, and sticking with it until one has achieved the thing of value. No one can do it for you.

That the chemical transactions in your brain likely differ from those in other brains might cause you to view your own agency as limited or absent. With that view you are as doomed as the student waiting to be sufficiently motivated by his teacher. In the meantime I suggest you continue to watch and revere those who do not shrink back in the face of apparent obstacles to their own success.

Motivation and Testing

If The Graduate was remade for today I’d have the “one word” for Dustin Hoffman’s character: testing. If it isn’t already, testing will soon be as ubiquitous as plastics. If your interest is in making money you should consider investing in this high growth industry. Like plastics, though, testing clutters the landscape like so much cheap refuse.

I’m a teacher-educator at Emory & Henry College, a small private liberal arts college in SW Virginia. In order to enter our program students must take and pass the Praxis I test in mathematics, reading, and writing (or it’s equivalent.)  For many this is just another $135 hoop. For a few it is a major roadblock. And then there are those for whom the Praxis I is a whole series of $135 stepping stones. These students are making the yacht payments for the well-placed at ETS.

OK, so I’m revealing my bias against testing as big business. So much of our schooling is centered on testing, let’s hope it isn’t all bad. I am prepared to at least provisionally accept that well constructed tests measure something of value. I think we are wrong about what tests measure, though, and I will use the data from a recent study by (who else?) ETS to prove it.

The explicit assumption most of us make is that tests measure knowledge and/or skills. Many criticisms may be leveled at tests, but they would assert something like this test isn’t good because it doesn’t accurately measure what the test-taker knows or can do. In other words we take for granted that tests --  by definition -- are at least meant to measure knowledge and skills. For example let’s say Johnny takes the Praxis I and gets a combined score (across the 3 subtests) of 532. The Virginia legislature has deemed that this score indicates Johnny has the minimal knowledge and skills to enter into a teacher preparation program. Let’s set aside (for now) the problem that if Johnny had, because of some very minor perturbation, scored a minutely different 531, his score would have indicated he did NOT have the minimal knowledge and skills to enter into a teacher preparation program. Apart from that, I’m guessing that my description so far is uncontroversial. I can probably even safely add that the reason that Johnny scored better than Jerry -- who took the same test on the same day and scored a distinctly lower 515 -- is because Johnny knows and/or can do more than Jerry. Getting agreement beyond this is going to be more difficult -- but let’s try. And fair warning: I’m trying to describe how most people think about this so I can then criticize it and suggest a better alternative.

Why is it that Johnny knows and/or can do more than Jerry? Some will say Johnny was better prepared by his prior experiences, some will say Johnny has higher native ability (at least for the sort of knowledge and skills measured on the Praxis test), and I think most will agree to a generic statement like: a combination of differences in ability and experiences led to the difference in knowledge and/or skills between Johnny and Jerry. I think this level of generality makes this statement as strong as it can be while keeping as many subscribers as possible. There may be few strict “nativists” who claim that all the difference can be explained by innate ability, and there may be a few strict developmentalists who claim that all the difference can be explained by experience, but most people will accept that both play a role, and indeed, may only make sense taken together. And we don’t know anything else about Johnny and Jerry to prejudice us about the potential explanations of the difference.

It may be an interesting aside to consider what question would you ask first if you sought an explanation for the difference between Johnny and Jerry. I suspect it would be something like: what were the differences in childhood environments between Johnny and Jerry? Any question that smacks of biological determinism has such negative connotations that you will likely try to avoid thinking about those questions. Instead you will ask: Did the caretakers encourage reading early? Did Johnny have better teachers in school? Did Jerry’s friends distract him from his studies? Like biology, though, these environmental factors are also “deterministic.” Early childhood environments are not chosen any more that one’s genes. I suppose we feel more like we can intervene in the fluid-seeming realm of the environment. I want you to see why that feeling is fallacious. More broadly I want you to see that these explanations are so brittle and prone to being misconstrued because they are built on a false assumption about what tests really measure.

If you’ve read this far you are probably a sincere educator, so I’d like to ask you a question that might clear up the fallacy over biological determinism. Given the choice, who would you prefer to help, a child with a difficult home life or a child with a learning disability? Silly question? I know, you don’t choose who comes in the door. And I also know you are exasperated by some of what you hear about what goes on at home. And you are frustrated by the difficulties some children have -- and the time it takes them to learn what others pick up quickly. Most importantly, the life work you have chosen is to help both. You will show the child with a difficult home life the security of a consistent and supportive classroom environment. You will help the child with a learning disability develop the specific reading strategy that will help him progress. We have equal purchase to intervene for a child regardless of the source of difference in that child’s performance.

It shouldn’t be about us, though. The child with a rough home life will go to that home at the end of the day. She will always be the child of her parents -- and the parent of her own children. The child with the learning disability will go to other classes and on to places of employment where he will have to rely on his own assimilated strategies to process information. We have to be careful not to overstep the boundaries of our responsibility -- because only one person can ultimately be responsible.

That brings me back to testing. Who is ultimately responsible for the score of a test-taker? I don’t ask this to start a buck-passing game. The answer tells us something important about what is really being tested. Here is the title (and conclusion) of the study conducted by ETS that I referenced near the beginning of this post: Motivation Matters. [full title and abstract at http://edr.sagepub.com/content/41/9/352.abstract]

The test that was tested (leave it to ETS!) was the Proficiency Profile, one of 3 major assessments offered by ETS to colleges and universities to measure the “value added” by higher education. The idea of these tests generally has been to give the assessment to freshman and seniors and use the difference as a measure of the value added at the institution. Colleges who bought into the assessment -- hoping to use it for accreditation or similar purposes -- have been torpedoed by the results that have now been widely publicized and discussed in the form of the book Academically Adrift, by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. If ETS wants to continue to sell this test to institutions of higher education it desperately needs to explain why the results of the assessments so far show little or no value added. Why wouldn’t the gains in knowledge and skills that surely come with years of college-level work be evidenced by a test designed to measure knowledge and skills? Maybe (the test-makers at ETS think to themselves) the test-takers are not sufficiently motivated! Let’s do a study to try and prove our hypothesis!

The study compared the results of 3 randomized groups each of which was given a slightly different consent form. The control group was given a standard consent form that indicated the test results would be kept confidential and only used by the research team. The personal condition group was given the same consent form with the addition of the clause: your test scores may be released to faculty in your college or to potential employers to evaluate your academic ability. The third group with the institutional condition was given the standard consent form with the addition of this clause: your test scores will be averaged with all other students taking the test at your college. Only this average will be reported to your college. This average may be used by employers and others to evaluate the quality of instruction at your college. This may affect how your institution is viewed and therefore affect the value of your diploma.

Check it out for yourself [full article at http://edr.sagepub.com/content/41/9/352.full#sec-4] but in my view the study was well designed and carried out, and the results are robust. Rather than follow the evidence to its logical conclusion, however, the researchers clung to their initial assumptions and then bent their analysis to fit it.

The researchers found that students in the personal condition group reported higher motivation (as measured by the Student Opinion Scale -- a 10-item self-report of test-taking motivation) and scored significantly higher on the Proficiency Profile than students in the control group. Students in the institutional condition also reported higher motivation than those in the control group, and also scored higher on the Proficiency Profile. Of course the researchers (who work for ETS) do not accept the obvious implications of the results. They stick to the assumption that the assessment measures skills and knowledge -- so long as students are sufficiently motivated. What is needed, they conclude, is to motivate students to take the test seriously (sound familiar?). So ETS will now provide all test-takers with an electronic certificate that indicates score and may be shared. Oh boy, another rationale to take the Proficiency Profile -- it may be required by future employers.

What the results of the ETS study show is that the Proficiency Profile measures the motivation to perform the skills and demonstrate the knowledge captured by the assessment. The model underlying our assumption that tests measure skills and knowledge directly is faulty. Using the conventional model of human performance we imagine that competence is derived from (some mixture of) innate ability and appropriately stimulating prior experience. Further we imagine that levels of performance can then be measured by a test so long as the test-taker is sufficiently motivated.

Here’s a better model: personal competence is the motivation to perform the skill or demonstrate the knowledge. That’s what the ETS study revealed --  test scores correlated with motivation scores. Motivation is considerably more complex than just the perceived use of a test score, of course, but the result is generalizable. Why did Johnny score higher on the Praxis 1 than Jerry? Johnny was more motivated than Jerry, and likely in a much deeper and more complex way than his feelings about a single test.

Ability and experience are the mechanical components of human performance. They twist and pull us like the strings of a puppeteer. Motivation cuts through and surrounds all of that like a fourth dimension. It isn't the same as free floating and mysterious willpower, but it does reside in and ultimately define the person. For better or worse, it directly corresponds with the responsibility given to the person. We cannot motivate a person, but we can -- and should -- hold him or her accountable. A person must be credited for what is due and debited for what is owed. We needn't have tests for this -- the world has it’s own way of settling accounts -- but any test we administer to a person can only give us a measure of his or her motivation to take it.