Enhancing Adult Motivation to Learn

A Comprehensive Guide for Teaching All Adults

Raymond J. Wlodkowski, Margery B. Ginsberg

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781119078012
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica per adulti

The classic interdisciplinary reference on adult education, updated for today's learning environment

Enhancing Adult Motivation to Learn provides adult educators with the information and strategies they need to guide non-traditional students toward positive educational outcomes. Providing a clear framework, guidelines for instructional planning, real-world examples, and cutting-edge ideas, this book fills the need for intrinsically motivating instruction targeted specifically toward adults returning to school. This new fourth edition sharpens the focus on community colleges, where most first-generation college students and working adults begin their higher education, and explores the rising use of technology and alternative delivery methods including a new chapter covering online instruction.

Since the publication of its first edition, this book has become a classic reference for understanding adult motivation in educational and training settings. As more and more adults re-enter the educational system, instructors and trainers will find extraordinary value in this exploration at the intersection of research and practice.

• Examine the latest neuroscience and psychological research pertaining to adult motivation and learning
• Delve into alternative formats including online learning, interactive learning materials, and more
• Elicit and encourage adult intrinsic motivation using the Motivational Framework for Culturally Responsive Teaching and sixty practical, research-backed strategies
• Adopt a culturally responsive instructional approach for an inclusive and equitable learning environment.

Adult students differ from traditional students in motivation, attitude, experience, and more; this, combined with an increasingly diverse body of students as well electronic delivery methods, makes today's teaching environment a new landscape for instructors to navigate. Enhancing Adult Motivation to Learn provides a clear guide to success for instructors and students alike.

Chapter 1
Understanding Motivation for Adult Learners

None of us are to be found in sets of tasks or lists of attributes; we can be known only in the unfolding of our unique stories within the context of everyday events.

Vivian Gussin Paley

Like the national economy, human motivation is a topic that people know is important, continuously discuss, and would like to predict. We want to know why people do what they do. But just as tomorrow's inflationary trend seems beyond our influence and understanding, so too do the causes of human behavior evade any simple explanation or prescription. We have invented a word to label this elusive topic—motivation. Its definition varies among scholars depending on their discipline and orientation. Most social scientists see motivation as a concept that explains why people think and behave as they do (Weiner, 1992). Many philosophers and religious thinkers have a similar understanding of motivation but use metaphysical assumptions to explain its dynamics.

Today, discoveries in the neurosciences offer a biological basis for what motivation is. Although this understanding remains far from complete, what we know about the working of the brain can enrich and integrate fields as disparate as psychology and philosophy. From a biological perspective, motivation is a process that “determines how much energy and attention the brain and body assign to a given stimulus—whether it's a thought coming in or a situation that confronts one” (Ratey, 2001, p. 247). Motivation binds emotion to action. It creates as well as guides purposeful behavior involving many systems and structures within the brain and body (Ratey, 2001).

Motivation is basic to our survival. It is the natural human process for giving behavior its energy and direction (Reeve, 2009). What makes motivation somewhat mysterious is that we cannot see it or touch it or precisely measure it. We have to infer it from what people say and do. We look for signs—effort, perseverance, completion—and we listen for words: “I want to . . .,” “We will . . .,” “You watch, I'll give it my best!” Because perceiving motivation is, at best, uncertain, there are different opinions about what motivation really is (Shernoff, 2013).

As educators, we know that understanding why people behave as they do is vitally important to helping them learn. We also know that culture, the deeply learned mix of language, beliefs, values, and behaviors that pervades every aspect of our lives, significantly influences our motivation. What we learn within our cultural groups shapes the physical networks and systems throughout our brains to make us unique individuals and culturally diverse people. Social scientists regard the cognitive processes (Rogoff and Chavajay, 1995) and learning as inherently cultural (O'Brien and Rogers, 2016). The language we use to think, the way we travel through our thoughts, how we communicate, and how we mediate moral choices cannot be separated from cultural practices and cultural context. Even experiencing a feeling as a particular emotion, such as sadness or joy or jealousy, is likely to have been conceptually learned in the cultural context of our families and peers as we developed during childhood and adolescence (Barrett, 2005).

Roland Tharp (Tharp and Gallimore, 1988) tells the story of an adult education English class in which the Hmong students themselves would supply a known personal context for fictional examples. When the teacher used a fictional Hmong name during language practice, the students invariably stopped the lesson to check with one another about who this person might be in the Hmong community. With a sense of humor, these adults brought, as all adults do, their personal experience to the classroom. We are the history of our lives, and our motivation is inseparable from our learning, which is inseparable from our cultural experience.

Being motivated means being purposeful. We use attention, concentration, imagination, passion, and other processes to pursue goals, such as learning a particular subject or completing a degree. How we arrive at our goals and how processes such as our passion for a subject take shape are, to some extent, culturally bound to what we have learned in our families and communities.

Seeing human motivation as purposeful enables us to create a knowledge base about effective ways to help adults begin learning, make choices about learning, sustain learning, and complete learning. Thus, we are dealing with issues of motivation when we as instructors ask questions such as, “What can I do to help these learners get started?” and “What can I do to encourage them to put more effort into their learning?” and “How can I create a relevant learning activity?” However, because of the impact of culture on their motivation, the way we answer these questions will likely vary related to the different cultural backgrounds of the learners.

Although there have been attempts to organize and simplify the research knowledge regarding motivation to learn (Brophy, 2004), instructors often lack the educational knowledge (Guy, 2005) and experience to consistently and sensitively influence the motivation of linguistically and culturally different adult learners (Gay, 2010). Culturally responsive teaching (Ginsberg and Wlodkowski, 2009) and neuroscientific understanding of adult learning (Johnson and Taylor, 2006) are recent areas of inquiry and practice in adult education. As a result, instructors still tend to rely on their experience, intuition, common sense, and trial and error. Because intuition and common sense are often based on tacit knowledge, unarticulated understanding, and skills operating at a level below full consciousness and learned within our cultural groups, such knowledge can mislead us. For example, some instructors in culturally diverse environments ask students to respond to direct questions about their personal or family history, topics that are most uncomfortable for students whose traditions teach modesty in public settings. These teachers are not mean‐spirited or insensitive. More likely, they are trying to be pragmatic. In general, they believe they get more learner participation and emotional involvement from students by asking candid questions and they do not have an effective alternative for generating energetic discussions. And most important, such an approach does not conflict with their values.

Without a model of culturally responsive instruction with which to organize and assess their motivational practices, instructors cannot easily refine their teaching. What they learn about motivation from experience on the job and from formal courses is often fragmented and only partially relevant to the increasing diversity in their classrooms and online courses (Linnenbrink‐Garcia and Patall, 2016). However, there are a significant number of well‐researched ideas and findings that can be applied to learning situations according to motivation principles. The following chapters thoroughly discuss many of these motivational strategies and present a structure, the Motivational Framework for Culturally Responsive Teaching, to organize and apply them in a manner sensitive to linguistic and cultural differences. As we will see, current neuroscientific principles and research offer considerable support for this model and its related ideas.

WHY MOTIVATION IS AS IMPORTANT AS ACHIEVEMENT

We know motivation is important because throughout our lives we have all seen the motivated person surpass the less‐motivated person in performance and outcome even though both have similar capability and the same opportunity. We know this from our experience and observation. We know this as we know a rock is hard and water is wet. We do not need reams of research findings to establish this reality for us. When we do consult research, we find that it generally supports our life experience regarding motivation. To put it quite simply, when there is no motivation to learn, there is no learning (Walberg and Uguroglu, 1980). In reality, motivation is not an either‐or condition, but when motivation to learn is very low, we can generally assume that potential learning will be diminished.

Although there have been research studies of adult motivation to participate in adult education programs (Benseman, 2005), no major research studies thoroughly examine the relationship between adult motivation and learning. With an estimated 50 percent of all adults between the ages of twenty‐five and fifty‐five involved in some form of adult education (Ginsberg and Wlodkowski, 2010) and 58 percent of the US population twenty‐five and over reporting some college education (US Census Bureau, 2013), a comprehensive research study on the influence of motivation on adult learning is due.

If we define motivation to learn as the tendency to find learning activities meaningful and worthwhile and to benefit from them—to try to make sense of the information available, relate this information to prior knowledge, and attempt to gain the knowledge and skills the activity develops (Brophy, 2004)—the best analyses of the relationship of motivation to learning continue to be found in youth education. In this field of research, there is substantial evidence that motivation is consistently positively related to engagement, learning, and educational achievement (Hulleman and Barron, 2016). There is an increasing number of studies that use motivational strategies in schools and learning environments that indicate that these interventions have a significant impact on student educational outcomes. Encouragingly, a few of these studies have included community college students, some of whom are first‐generation, postsecondary adult learners (Silva and White, 2012).

More recently, there has been an increasing amount of research on “engagement” in youth education. As concepts, motivation and engagement are related (Shernoff, 2013). Motivation tends to be seen as an individual's behavior, goals, beliefs, emotions, and thoughts. Research on engagement focuses more on the observable interaction between the person and a system or environment with emphasis on activities and relationships. When applied to learning, motivation and engagement studies converge to include active participation in academic activities, recognize the necessity of energy and effort, and acknowledge the influence of culture and context on all learners (Christenson, Reschly, and Wylie, 2012). Thus, we consider engagement to be a motivational construct. Research findings based on engagement studies continue to suggest that motivation positively influences learning (Fredricks, Blumenfeld, and Paris, 2004).

As psychologists have found (Pintrich, 1991), and as teachers know, people motivated to learn are more likely to do things they believe will help them learn. They attend more carefully to instruction. They rehearse material in order to remember it. They take notes to improve their subsequent studying. They reflect on how well they understand what they are learning and are more likely to ask for help when they are uncertain. One needs little understanding of psychology to realize that this array of activities contributes to learning. In a study of adult learners in an urban university, researchers found that when adults perceived their courses as supportive of intrinsic motivation, they were likely to receive higher grades (Wlodkowski, Mauldin, and Gahn, 2001).

Motivation is important not only because it apparently improves learning but also because it mediates learning and is a consequence of learning as well. Psychologically and biologically, motivation and learning are inseparable (Reeve and Lee, 2012). Instructors have long known that when learners are motivated during the learning process, things go more smoothly, communication flows, anxiety decreases, and creativity and learning are more apparent. Instruction with motivated learners can actually be joyful and exciting, especially for the instructor. Learners who complete a learning experience feeling positively motivated about what they have learned are more likely to have a continuing interest in and to use what they have learned (see the section, “How Meaning Sustains Involvement” in chapter Four).

SOME LIMITS TO MOTIVATION'S INFLUENCE ON LEARNING

To maintain a realistic perspective, however, we need to acknowledge that although some degree of motivation is necessary for learning, other factors—personal skill and quality of instruction, for example—are also necessary for learning to occur. If the learning tasks are well beyond their current skills or prior knowledge, people will not be able to accomplish them, no matter how motivated they are. In fact, at a certain point these mandatory learning factors, including motivation, are insufficient. For example, if learners are involved in a genuinely challenging subject for which they have the necessary capabilities, a point will come at which further progress will require effort (motivation), whether in the form of extra practice or increased study time, to make further progress. Conversely, outstanding effort can be limited by the learner's capabilities or by the quality of instruction. Sports are a common example for the limits of capabilities. Many athletes make tremendous strides in a particular sport because of exemplary effort but finally reach a level of competition at which their coordination or speed is insufficient for further progress. An example of the influence of the quality of instruction is a learner who has the capability and motivation to do well in math but is limited by an obtuse textbook with culturally irreleva...