Encouraging Student Motivation Series: Topic Intro | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
Encouraging Student Motivation Series
Part 3:
Motivating Students through Clear Expectations and Feedback
Overview
How can I communicate clear expectations for student performance?
Students tend to perform better when they know what is expected of them and are given guidance on how to meet those expectations (McNair et al., 2020; Davis, 2009).
Suggestions on how to set expectations in the classroom:
| Strategies | Teaching Suggestions for Overall Course Expectations |
| Make your expectations clear in the syllabus. | Use the syllabus to clearly define what students need to do to be successful in your class, and provide them with explanations, timelines, and additional resources for each assignment. |
| Tell them you believe they can meet your expectations. | In addition to communicating what the important learning objectives are, let your students know that you expect that they will meet these goals--you believe they can do it. This is especially important for underrepresented or underprepared students. |
| Provide lesson objectives. | Try to provide learning objectives for each lesson that tell students what they will learn and ensure that students are aware of these learning objectives and any assessments. You could do this by starting each class period with either a one-slide presentation of the day’s learning objectives or writing the learning objectives on the board. An example from Linguistics might be: “Today we will be discussing morphemes. By the end of the class, you should be able to define what a morpheme is, differentiate free versus bound morphemes, and be able to generate examples of each type.” |
| Post rubrics well in advance of due dates. | Whenever possible, post assignment grading rubrics for the students to peruse before starting the assignment. This allows students to evaluate their own work according to your expectations prior to grading and gives guidelines for improvement. American Association of Colleges & Universities provides models for wide ranging examples (these 16 rubrics can be downloaded and customized for your course). |
| Provide examples from previous students. | If possible, provide examples of successful student work along with rubrics. This can give students a model to reference as they work on their own project. |
Beyond the global suggestions for clearly communicating expectations in the course, instructors can also ensure individual lessons are clear and transparent. Transparency in teaching ensures that expectations, underlying purposes, and processes for teaching and learning are all visible to students. Students who received transparent instruction that emphasized the purpose of tasks, expectations for completion, realworld applicability, and criteria for success demonstrated higher levels of confidence, feelings of belonging, and metacognition (Winkelmes et al., 2016). These feelings all serve as sources of intrinsic motivation for students.
Evidence-based approach for creating transparent activities and assignments:
| Transparent Teaching Framework for Class Activities and Assignments | ||
| Purpose | Explicitly describe the underlying purpose of the assignment. Why are students tasked with this? What skills will they practice? What knowledge will they gain? How does it connect with prior or future learning? | |
| Task | Explain the task, assignment, or activity in detail. What do you want students to do? How do you want them to do it? | |
| Criteria | Define the characteristics of all parts of a successful completion. | |
For more examples and resources on the TILT framework described above, you can visit their website here.
How can effective feedback help motivate my class?
Studies show that students tend to value feedback that is “timely, individualized and focused” (Hyland, 2013). Research also demonstrates that goal-directed practice must be combined with targeted feedback to optimize learning. Aligning what we ask students to practice with effective feedback will help realize the potential for learning (Ambrose et al., 2010).
Suggestions on providing effective feedback:
| Strategies | Teaching Suggestions |
| Practice effective feedbacking strategies. | Providing students with timely, task-specific positive feedback increases intrinsic motivation to learn and helps students stay on-task during classroom learning activities (Cameron & Pierce, 1994). For more suggestions on how to provide effective feedback to students, see our “Effective Feedback Series.” |
| Avoid singling out specific students for praise or comparing one group of students to another. | Instead, praise the class as a whole for performance on tasks. For example, you could say: “Overall, the class did very well on the exam/problem set/writing assignment. I’m very pleased with your performance. If you weren’t happy with your performance, please come see me and we’ll work on a plan to help you get your grade to where you’d like it to be.” |
| Provide individual written/verbal praise on specific assignments. | Individualized feedback helps the student to feel that they stand out and prevents feelings of anonymity. The Speedgrader tool in Canvas can help make the process of composing feedback easier as it provides a quick and direct way to give each student individual feedback and grades for work submitted online. For some assignments, the Gradescope tool can also be useful in providing standardized feedback to common errors. |
| Ensure the feedback is returned is a timely fashion. | This encourages students to pay attention to your feedback, and to incorporate that feedback into future assignments. |
| Consider multi-phased assignments that rely | Unpacking an assignment into multiple parts allows students to learn from prior work and implement the focused suggestions into future parts of the |
| on implementing feedback as part of the grade. | assignment. For example, integrating prior feedback can be included as a dimension of a rubric for a final paper. |
- Acknowledgements
- The section on transparency in class activities and assignments was adapted from a CEE workshop, Transparency in Teaching, facilitated by Rachel Stumpf (PhD, Education Specialist, Center for Educational Effectiveness).
- Additional Resources
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- For more on designing rubrics from the Eberly Center at Carnegie Mellon, visit this site
- For more on transparent design, access this book: Transparent Design in Higher Education Teaching and Learning by Mary-Ann Winkelmes (ebook from UCD Library)
- Citation
- Center for Educational Effectiveness [CEE]. (2022). Encouraging student motivation series. Just-in-Time Teaching Resources. Retrieved from https://cee.ucdavis.edu/JITT
- References
- Ambrose, S. A., et al. (2010). How learning works: Seven research-based principles for smart teaching (pp. 66–90). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
McNair, T., Bensimon, E., & Malcom-Piqueux, L. (2020). From equity talk to equity walk. Hoboken, NJ: Jossey-Bass.
Cameron, J., & Pierce, W. D. (1994). Reinforcement, reward, and intrinsic motivation: A meta-analysis. Review of Educational Research, 64(3), 363–423. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543064003363
Deci, E. L., Koestner, R., & Ryan, R. M. (1999). A meta-analytic review of experiments examining the effects of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 125(6), 627.
Hyland, K. (2013). Student perceptions of hidden messages in teacher written feedback. Studies in Educational Evaluation, 39(3), 180–187. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.stueduc.2013.06.003
Lotkowski, V. A., Robbins, S. B., & Noeth, R. J. (2004). The role of academic and non-academic factors in improving college retention. ACT Policy Report. American College Testing ACT Inc.
Paulsen, M. B., & Feldman, K. A. (1999). Student motivation and epistemological beliefs. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 1999(78), 17–25. https://doi.org/10.1002/tl.7802
Robbins, S. B., Lauver, K., Le, H., Davis, D., Langley, R., & Carlstrom, A. (2004). Do psychosocial and study skill factors predict college outcomes? A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 130(2), 261–288. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.130.2.261
Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Intrinsic and extrinsic motivations: Classic definitions and new directions. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 25(1), 54–67.
Struthers, C. W., Perry, R. P., & Menec, V. H. (2000). An examination of the relationship among academic stress, coping, motivation, and performance in college. Research in Higher Education, 41(5), 581–592. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1007094931292
Winkelmes, M., Bernacki, M., Butler, J., Zochowski, M., Golanics, J., & Harriss, K. (2016). A teaching intervention that increases underserved college students’ success: Research findings from the transparency and problem-centered learning project. Peer Review, 18(1–2), 31–36.