Motivation is rocket fuel for learning
In my opinion the most useful theory you need to know about human behavior and learning is the Self Determination Theory (SDT). SDT is about human motivation, and if you understand the implications of SDT, you will start treating people in a way that will increase their motivation to perform and to learn.
SDT is a highly relevant tool for anyone with a responsibility to get the most out of people, whether you are a manager or work with education as a teacher or an instructional designer.
SDT is developed over the last thirty years by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan from University of Rochester. It is useful because it can be used to explain why individual learning experiences succeed or fail, and because it provides a hands-on understanding of how to support people’s motivation to do anything.
Why focus on motivation and not on learning?
Motivation is the only thing that leads to voluntary deliberate action. Motivation is rocket fuel for learning. If you are truly motivated to learn something, you can learn very difficult things from even bad materials, and consequently; it can be impossible to learn anything at all from the best materials in the world, if you are not motivated to do so. To summarize:
Motivation is the key, without motivation there is no learning.
Dr. BJ Fogg from The Persuasive Tech Lab at Stanford University has developed the Fogg Behavior Model, which illustrates this idea that high motivation will lead to action even if it is hard to do, and vice versa. He also adds the concept of a “trigger” which will initiate the action. I won’t dwell further on Fogg’s work for now, but I wanted to show you the model which I think is very illustrative.
Two types of Motivation
The first thing you need to know about motivation is that there are two types of motivation: Intrinsic and extrinsic
Intrinsic motivation is when people do something because they want to, because they find it interesting, fun and generally satisfying in itself. Extrinsic motivation is when people do something to achieve an external goal - like passing an exam, winning points, badges or similar. Intrinsic/Extrinsic motivation is on a range going from fully self-determined (Intrinsic) to fully non-self-determined. In between exists degrees of self-determination such as doing something you don’t want to do, because you acknowledge the importance to you - like “I really don’t like learning mathematics, but I can see that it is important for me to learn”.
I won’t go into further detail about this. For now, let us establish that intrinsic motivation is much more powerful than extrinsic, and the closer we can get towards intrinsic motivation, the more motivation we get. You are naturally more motivated to do things you want to - watch a movie, play music, be with friends - than doing things because of external reasons, like studying something that does not interest you, in order to pass a test. An important thing to note is that external motivators, such as rewards, often have a negative impact on performance and intrinsic motivation.
The three parameters of Motivation
SDT says that there are three parameters which affect our motivation - and as result our behavior: Autonomy, Competence and Relatedness.
They sometimes referred to as: Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose.
Autonomy
Is the perceived ability to freely decide your own actions. Autonomy does not mean independence from others, or that an individual need to decide something else than then majority.
Competence
We are rewarded by our brains when we learn something that might be useful for us in the future. That’s why people practice dribbling a ball or playing the guitar to the point their fingers get sore - if they feel they get better at it. Conversely, no one voluntarily keeps practicing something that they do not feel they get better at, or if the gap between ability and difficulty of the task is too large.
Relatedness
Humans are social creatures and are rewarded by our brains to interact with, feel connected with, and care for other humans. To be part of a group increases our chances of survival in a harsh environment. Relatedness also loosely translates to meaning or purpose. It is important to realize that the purpose element is deeply personal. Just because the company you work for has a purpose, it does not mean that it is meaningful to you - even if you like your job.
From an evolutionary perspective both Competence and Relatedness increases our chances of survival. To me it makes sense, that we lose our motivation if we feel restricted in our ability to decide by ourselves, how to meet our desire for competence and relatedness. Lack of self-determination affects our long-term survival and therefore we have evolved to seek and remain in situations where there is a good mix of the three parameters.
All three parameters do not need to be present at the same time and in equal amounts. One example of this could be walking door to door to ask for money for a charity. Typically, a task like that does not require great competence and does not have a lot of autonomy either, but it does score high on the relatedness parameter, doing something for other people. Doing the same task with a friend would add even more relatedness to the mix. Another example of this is that it is known, that people who do routine tasks, which inherently has low autonomy, becomes more motivated if they get influence on how the tasks are solved.
How can Self Determination Theory be used to create good learning?
What I really like about SDT is, that it provides a framework to explain a lot of the common-sensical advice about learning and human behavior that is around us. Like “Make e-learning interactive”, “Ask questions to the audience”, “Make it social” and so on. But sometimes these pieces of advice become goals by themselves, for example the use of interactivity for the sake of interactivity. In this case the solution gets decoupled from the main purpose, to motivate people.
Danish scientist Louise Klinge has done some fantastic research and used the SDT in her PhD to analyse the behavior of students in a classroom setting (in a public school). She found that teachers who best supported the students need for Autonomy, Competence and Relatedness resulted in better learning results, increased student engagement, self-esteem and persistence. Paraphrasing Louise Klinge, she describes the effect on an individual student who was “difficult” with one teacher who rarely accommodated his needs for Autonomy, Competence and Relatedness. When the class had another teacher, who supported the student’s needs, the same student was helpful, concentrated and contributed in a positive manner to the class.
If you are a teacher or instructor in a classroom and you are the only one talking, you are essentially restricting the autonomy of your students, because they don’t get to reflect with and mentally interact upon the material. Louise Klinge summarizes some recommendations to teachers (and instructors):
- Welcome initiatives, suggestions and questions from the students (Autonomy)
- Involve the students and let them contribute (Autonomy, Feeling of Competence, Relatedness)
- Don’t talk too long at any one time (Autonomy)
- Allow students to help each other (Relatedness)
- Make sure the students get along socially (Relatedness)
While this research was done with students in a public school, there is nothing to suggests that the above advice does not hold true for adult education as well. SDT does not only apply to children.
Louise Klinge also notes that the SDT is not widely known within public education in Denmark. My guess is that it’s not really widely known within education anywhere, and in my opinion, everybody should know about this😊 (I would love to be proven wrong - leave a comment if I am).
Another thing I really like about SDT is that it is both useful in a public education setting as well as within corporate learning. Too often the theories in one realm is not useful, or well-regarded for that matter, in the other. This shows the strength of SDT and suggests that If you have SDT in mind when you are managing people or designing learning you are increasing your chances of succeeding in your endeavor.
Let us take look at each of the parameters in SDT and what implications it has for learning.
Autonomy and learning
Free free, set them free
Whether you create classroom training or e-learning you should respect the learners desire to control how they learn and assume that your learners really want to learn.
The support for user autonomy should be balanced with the risk of overload. Giving learners too many choices risks overloading them. Give them meaningful choices that they understand.
If you design e-learning, and indeed any form of digital learning, you can support the users need for autonomy by allowing users to start, stop, pause, rewind and fast forward. You should also allow them to skip sections they feel the understand, or jump to sections they are particularly interested in. For the learner to feel that they are able to take good decisions, the learner also need to know “where they are” in the content and how much is left. So, you should make sure they get an idea as to how much content there is available, how long they should expect to spend watching and so on. If you design a linear e-learning module, then provide a menu which allows them to jump to any page they want.
You should also make sure they understand what they are expected to learn. This also has an impact on relatedness.
If you object to the notion of setting people free and think that exposing people by force to learning material will make them learn, I suggest that you read my article Force them to watch it: How NOT to design e-learning if you want engaged learners.
It is a little trickier to involve users when designing e-learning, because you cannot respond to the their answer immediately, but in my experience, at lot of people will respond in an e-learning course if you ask them an open question like, how they will apply what they have just learned in an essay question. Such questions allow the user to reflect upon what they have learned and encourage them to incorporate it with their existing knowledge.
Competence and learning
Not too easy, not too difficult
People have a desire to both feel they are competent and to feel that they are becoming more competent. Make sure the relationship between the ability of the learner and the difficulty of the task is suitable. Whether learners feel a task is too easy or it is too difficult, they get either bored or anxious. This is obviously easier said than done, but it just underscores the importance of keeping your target audience in mind and involve them during the design phase.
Let them figure things out for themselves
Rather than telling them everything, give learners a chance to figure things out for themselves. Again, this should be balanced with the risk of making the content too difficult to use.
Let users practice and give them feedback
Create practice exercises and give learners feedback, so they can see that they are getting better at whatever they are learning.
Relatedness and learning
Make it social
Have people work together with other people. Note, for digital learning this will typically need to be facilitated initially, just providing a discussion forum does not necessarily mean that mean people will use it.
Rather than stating facts, expecting people to remember, tell stories about how people are impacted about what you are explaining. Use pictures or video of people in your content and have them explain the content.
What’s in it for me?
Make sure the learners understand why it is important to them, or to other people, that they learn what you want them to learn. If you fail to do this, you will struggle with everything else - and so will your learners.
What you do think?
It is not my intention that these recommendations should form a conclusive list of all recommendations one can derive from the Self Determination Theory, but hopefully they illustrate how one can use SDT as a practical guide when designing learning.
I would love to hear from you in the comments if you have any ideas on how to support each of the three parameters in learning design.
I hope you have enjoyed reading this as much as I have enjoyed writing it.
PS. If you liked this, you might like these two articles as well:
