Motivation: Past, Present, and Future

Advances in Health Sciences Education

That idea that problem-based learning (PBL) is more motivating that traditional education has been prevalent since the inception of PBL at McMaster University in the late 1960s. Evidencing this through empirical research, however, has proven to be a lot more problematic. This paper retraces how the discourse on motivation started from a laymen's conception in the early days of PBL, and slowly evolved into a field of scientific inquiry in the 1980s and 1990s. However, looking at the evolution of motivation theory over the same period, we show that motivation discourse in the burgeoning literature on motivation and PBL remained largely wedded to the laymen's approach, and failed to catch up with the new achievement-goal theory and self-determination theory approaches. This paper proceeds to analyse the explosion of studies on PBL and motivation after 2000, acknowledging efforts to move away from anecdotal accounts and provide theoretical grounding to the research. However, once again, we show that the majority of the research employed outdated motivational measures that do not fully grasp the complexity of contemporary motivation theory. The paper concludes on the observation that single-course and curriculum-wide research interventions have yielded no conclusive results on the effect of PBL on intrinsic motivation, and that future research should therefore seek to use up-to-date motivational constructs in more targeted interventions.

Educational Psychology

Intercultural Education, 2017

While motivation is commonly interpreted as an individual student's characteristic, motivational perceptions and beliefs, such as causal attributions of success and failure, are embedded in cultural meanings and contextual practices. The current study aimed to investigate causal attributions among Arab high school students in Israel and to interpret them in the light of their cultural-political context. Two hundred and five 11th-grade Arab students from three different geographic regions in Israel responded to open-ended and closed survey questions about events of success and failure in school. The analysis indicated that students overwhelmingly considered exams when thinking about events of success and failure, reflecting the normative teacher-centred pedagogical practices in schools. The analysis also manifested patterns of a self-serving bias. These findings are interpreted in the light of the cultural-political characteristics of the Arab school system in Israel. Arab students in Israel attain lower academic achievement relative to their Jewish counterparts (Arar 2012). Despite some positive changes during the last couple of decades, Arab students still lag behind Jewish students in high-school matriculation eligibility (53.3% vs. 60.5%) and admission to higher education (38.2 vs. 51.0%) (Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS), State of Israel 2014). This decades-long state of affairs is undergirded by complex political-historical, economic, institutional, and cultural processes (Resh and Benavot 2009) that manifest in student motivation including choice, effort, and persistence in the face of difficulty and failure (Al-Haj 1995; Birenbaum and Kraemer 1995). Traditional theories ground motivation and success in stable personality characteristics that are shaped by cultural experiences early in life (McClelland 1961). In contrast, most contemporary perspectives consider motivational phenomena to be based in social-cognitive processes such as causal attributions for success and failure, perceived ability in and valuation of the subject area, and goals for schoolwork (Graham and Weiner 2012). Whereas these perspectives acknowledge the role of culture and context in students' motivation (Eccles 1983; Maehr and Nicholls 1980; Weiner 1986), most research has focused primarily on individual-level motivational processes, largely overlooking demographic, cultural, and institutional contexts in which students live, learn, and are required to perform (King & McInerney 2014). In the current study we

Medical Education, 2017

International Journal of STEM Education

Background Motivation is critical for supporting persistence and achievement in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. In this study, we focus on the assessment of mathematics motivation among secondary school students. We provide validity and reliability evidence for the Mathematics Motivation Questionnaire (MMQ)—adapted from the Science Motivation Questionnaire designed for college students—using data from 2551 secondary students from seven states across the United States. Results Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses confirmed five latent factors of the MMQ indicated by 19 items: intrinsic value, self-regulation, self-efficacy, utility value, and test anxiety. The nonlinear SEM reliability coefficients of the five constructs ranged from 0.76 to 0.91. To assess criterion validity, analyses using a subset of the data that included students’ mathematics standardized scores (n = 536) indicated that intrinsic value, self-regulation, and self-effic...