What Teachers Need to Know about Motivation

Motivation is key to engaging students in meaningful and productive work. Identifying individual students’ interests would be ideal, but in the real world, we need to create and sustain “situational interest.” Smith and Wilhelm reference their own research as well as other research that is contextually very different to show how the same principles of providing choice (to promote a personal connection) and supporting competence (through the teaching of immediately useful strategies) resulted in motivation that deepened learning.