Collaborative Research: Understanding and Supporting Student Intrinsic Motivation in STEM Courses

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Building on prior work in motivation, this project is collecting and analyzing quantitative and qualitative data to improve the capability to characterize and explain key characteristics of student motivation in diverse undergraduate courses required for engineering education. This project is engaging instructors in the process of interpreting student motivation data, coupling these research data to motivation theory and course design, and developing course revisions aimed at enhancing STEM students' intrinsic drive.Intellectual MeritThis research rests on prior research that shows that instructors can directly influence student motivation, particularly intrinsic motivation, through their course design decisions. To capitalize on the potential of this relationship, instructors need both a more nuanced understanding of the types of student motivations for learning and access to clearer methods for translating theory and empirical data to course-level insights. This project is measuring individual student responses to diverse STEM environments, pedagogies, and assignments. The temporal evolution of these responses is a focal point in the development of transferable research and generalizable theories for STEM student motivational drive.The analysis of motivation data in more nuanced ways examines general trends in motivation by course activity, year of study, and gender. Motivation is dynamic and susceptible to frequent and sometimes rapid change. The analysis uses group-based clustering techniques to discover the strength, persistence, and distribution of different types of motivational responses. It employs qualitative analyses to explain the relationships between motivation and the learning environment and elucidate gendered differences in motivation. Using both variable- and cluster-based analyses in multiple course analyses has promise in developing better understanding of the impact of instructional design on effective practice. BROADER IMPACTSThe National Academy of Engineering exhorts us to prepare STEM graduates with "the tools needed for the world as it will be, not as it is today." Among these tools are creativity, critical thinking, resiliency, flexibility, and self-regulation. Educational research suggests that improved understanding of learner motivation is important to facilitate a systemic shift toward these high-level outcomes. However, a large gap remains between the research-based understanding of student motivation, and the application of those research insights to day-to-day classroom practice. The output from this project will have an immediate impact on over 20 STEM instructors at the 8 participating institutions, by highlighting activities that prompt different motivational responses and motivational shifts, explaining motivation-environment interactions, and by enabling instructors to use research data to make informed and strategic choices to better encourage self-determined behaviors. The project expands the pool of STEM faculty who can make informed, data-driven decisions by engaging early-career faculty and those with limited prior involvement in STEM educational reform.