Students’ reasons for pursing an area of study are often very personal. Drawing on these personal factors can help students sustain motivation in your course by helping them develop connections to each other, the discipline, and the world around them. This page offers strategies from research literature and our L&S colleagues for recruiting student motivation.
Pick one Mini Discussion below and include a 10-15 minute conversation in your next group meeting.
1. Incorporate Real-World Applications
In the Spring 2025 semester, the IDC had a conversation with the Dean’s Ambassadors–a group of L&S students–about teaching and learning. These students shared that incorporating authentic content, such as real-world examples and scenarios, motivated them to engage with the course. Examples included:
- Case study analysis activities in Communication Sciences & Disorders,
- Computer Science projects that require students to integrate skills from across the semester,
- A Landscape Architecture class where students work together to design an outdoor classroom for a local elementary school,
- A Political Science class that organizes and participates in a mock ranked choice voting election,
- And a data science class that analyzed local CDC data on viral transmission.
Discussion Questions
- How can your class material connect to students’ experiences or events outside the classroom?
- Which assignments or activities provide an opportunity for students to solve problems or draw inspiration from these events?
3. Provide Sufficient Challenge
From Episode 29 of the L&S Exchange Podcast with six L&S undergraduate students.
The L&S Exchange Podcast spoke with six L&S undergraduate students in the spring of 2025 to hear their perspectives on what makes a great course. Several students spoke about challenge being essential to an engaging course, including Grace:
“I am personally a huge fan of challenge. I’m in classes right now that some of them I feel like don’t challenge me and I don’t find them as interesting. I love to go talk to a professor after class or go to office hours to help me with content that I’m not quite understanding. But I actually try to pick classes that I know I’m gonna have a hard time with because to me, I think the part of learning I enjoy the most is that roadblock. I feel like I learn better when I have to put it down, take a step back and come back. I really appreciate not knowing the right answer right away and being able to get there eventually, or finding multiple ways to get to an answer. So I really like when there’s challenge involved in my courses. ”
Discussion Questions
- How do you know whether specific concepts, assignments, or units are too easy or too difficult for students?
- When and how does your course provide students with time and support to work through challenges?
4. Incorporate Self-Determination Theory
Self-determination theory positions three needs as essential to human motivation and wellbeing: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Incorporating these into your classroom can support your students’ motivation to be present and engage.
- “Autonomy concerns a sense of initiative and ownership in one’s actions. It is supported by experiences of interest and value and undermined by experiences of being externally controlled, whether by rewards or punishments.”
- “Competence concerns the feeling of mastery, a sense that one can succeed and grow. The need for competence is best satisfied within well-structured environments that afford optimal challenges, positive feedback, and opportunities for growth.”
- “Finally, relatedness concerns a sense of belonging and connection. It is facilitated by conveyance of respect and caring.”
From Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2020). Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation from a self-determination theory perspective: Definitions, theory, practices, and future directions. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 61, 101860. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cedpsych.2020.101860
Discussion Questions
- When and how do you experience autonomy, competence, and relatedness in your own daily life?
- How might you help your students experience autonomy, competence, and relatedness within your classroom?
5. Connect to Students' Ways of Knowing
From Episode 12 of the L&S Exchange Podcast with Janet Batzli.
The phrase “ways of knowing” refers to how we know what we claim to know. Four widely accepted epistemological categories are: sensory perception, reason/logic, authority, and intuition/feeling. As academics, we often work from ways of knowing grounded in sensory perception (e.g., scientific method), logical reasoning, and authority. Janet Batzli from the Biocore Program speaks about connecting with different ways of knowing, including those that are more intuitive or emotional, to help motivate students.
“…all of our students are coming into our classroom, typically with an interest, and that interest is emotionally motivated. They come in and say, I love biology, or I love computer science, or I love political science. Some of them are searching and they discover their love through class, but there’s an emotional component to this… bringing that into the classroom and just acknowledging that there’s not just one way of knowing.”
Discussion Questions
- What do students “love” that brings them to your classroom?
- Which career and major pathways does your course support? How can you incorporate these into your assignments or in-class activities?
2. Leverage Social Learning
Peer instruction is one social learning technique that can work with classes of any size. It has been found to benefit student learning within and beyond STEM courses.
Instructors may choose to show students the distribution of student answers before and after discussing with a peer, and Top Hat makes this easy to mediate with technology.
From Tullis, J. G., & Goldstone, R. L. (2020). Why does peer instruction benefit student learning? Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 5(1), 15. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-020-00218-5
Discussion Questions