Inquiry into Pupil Motivation

The Education Committee at the Scottish Parliament are currently conducting an inquiry into "Pupil Motivation". SPTC were asked to submit evidence.

Motivation does not equate with fun
In considering pupil motivation it is important not to confuse motivation with fun. It is important that children are not led to believe that life is one long computer game interrupted only by Christmas and holidays at Disneyland. There are times when life can be boring, unpleasant, dangerous or scary, and it is important that children learn how to cope with these situations.

Motivating Factors
Indeed, people can be motivated to do extremely unpleasant tasks when they see that the purpose and/or the outcome is worthwhile. In considering pupil motivation it is necessary to recognise that they can be motivated by a number of different factors.

1) A love of what they are studying; some – but not many – children will be so fascinated by a particular subject/activity that this is sufficient to make them motivated. Their motivation will survive bad teaching and active discouragement. In this group are children with a genuine academic bent, musicians, computer addicts and football fanatics.
Children can also be brought into this group, and their interest sustained there, by the enthusiasm of the teacher for the subject.
2) A desire to please/be successful; some children can be motivated simply by a desire to please parents/teacher and a desire to be successful. This might be a character trait (the self-motivated person will simply want to work to the best of their ability for the satisfaction that this brings) or it might be that they like the teacher enough to want to work for him/her.
3) Competition; some pupils are motivated by a wish to do better than their peers/one particular rival. 4) End objective; some pupils are motivated by a wish to take up a particular activity after school and by recognising the skills/qualifications that they need for their chosen path in life.
5) Competency; some children are simply highly competent and find doing well very easy.
6) To avoid negative consequences; some pupils can be motivated because the consequences of not working are unattractive to them – the scorn they would earn from parent/teacher. Many adults report how a scary teacher kept them working hard.
7) Self-image; some youngsters see themselves as successful and so will do those activities that they find easy but switch off from those they cannot do/where they may appear to fail. In contrast some youngsters are less concerned at self-image and are willing to try a range of activities, even those that they are not very good at.
8) Peer-pressure; research has often highlighted the impact peers can have on youngsters’ motivation to work. The positive side of this is the benefit of “getting in with a good crowd” when a group of hard working youngsters can reinforce individual motivation and lift the achievements of youngsters who might otherwise drift if left to their own devices.

Demotivating Factors
On the other hand, many of these “motivating” factors can turn children off. Pupils might simply dislike a subject, be no good at it, think that a teacher’s enthusiasm is pretty stupid, or not have any particular end objective. They may be disinterested in competition or decide that the competition they want to win is doing badly. They may simply not be very good at traditional school work or not care about the consequences of not working hard. They may get into a “bad crowd”, where the objective is not to work hard. Youngsters who have seen that “education “ has not guaranteed their parents/older siblings a job may question the value of working at school if it does not lead to a better job and more money.

No Magic Formula
There is, therefore, no magic formula for motivating youngsters. Effective teaching approaches will not be universally effective. Some youngsters go through school not liking anything, only to be caught later in life by a driving ambition that motivates them to learn. In contrast an apparently able pupil, who finds work easy and is very successful, may subsequently drift because it is the school context that helps him/her to work. Once this external discipline is removed, the youngster becomes unfocused.

Parents’ Influence
Parents affect youngsters’ motivation, but not always in the expected way. The over-ambitious parent can turn a child off whilst the utterly useless parent can motivate the child not to copy their parent’s life style. Children may pick up positive messages from their parents and decide to follow in their footsteps, hence the number of youngsters who follow their parents into the same occupation whether medicine, the law, sport or theatre. Alternatively, children may feel that they cannot emulate their parents’ successes and so they don’t bother to try.

Impact of Parents’ Educational Level
Research by the Centre for Educational Sociology in the early eighties established that the educational level of the mother is an important factor in determining how long the child will stay at education. The consequences of this link can be understood in two ways. In the first, there is the encouraging prospect that as more and more young people, particularly girls, stay on at school and go into Higher education, then this has a positive learning impact not only on those individuals, but also on the next generation. However, the negative aspect of these research findings is that where the parents (particularly the mother) have not stayed on beyond the compulsory school leaving age, then there is little likelihood that the child will do so either. However, what is true is that the group of people with advanced educational qualifications has expanded enormously since the sixties so there is now a much greater pool of potential second generation undergraduates. The fact that the children of those with no advanced qualification still only go to Higher Education in small numbers should not mask the fact that the group with no advanced qualifications is shrinking from generation to generation. It is an upward generational spiral.

Impact of Home Circumstances
People will be motivated to use education to move away from their home environment or not, depending on how they view their home circumstances. If they like it and have strong family loyalties they may chose to follow family traditions which could include rejecting school. The opposite is often seen in island communities (and to a lesser extent in remote rural communities) where success at education is a common route for the young people not only into Higher Education but also away from the island/rural community. Some find the experience pleasant and never return whilst others decide island/rural life is more important than a high paying job and may return with advance qualifications to follow very routine jobs. However, it is important to recognise that education is not only justified in terms of a high paying job. Many people in rural communities, and to some extent in urban communities, enjoy their education at a personal level, do mundane jobs intelligently but do not necessarily conform to the conventional view of a successful person.

Different Ways to be Successful
Indeed, it is a mistake to see school educational success as the only virtue. Some highly intelligent youngsters are de-motivated by the process of school but go on to be successful after school. It is not uncommon to discover that a highly successful entrepreneur truanted from school or was not successful academically. One important change is to allow more diverse ways of recognising success. Youngsters must not be given a single version of the successful pupil. Whilst it is extremely hard for teachers to cope with, we need to recognise that some youngsters are very inventive in their ways of not learning. We need to develop ways for that inventiveness to be channelled constructively.

Conclusion In many respects it is more important to focus on why people are demotivated than to look at those who currently do well in order to replicate their motivation for all. It is important not to define “failure” as failure to achieve academically. It is important to give youngsters a range of routes by which they can be successful. Education is essentially a human activity where the dynamic between the teacher and learner is critical. The important thing for successful learning is to get this dynamic right. Where the dynamic is detrimental, it is necessary to look not only at different teaching approaches, but also, perhaps, a different teacher without anyone feeling that this failure in the teaching-learning process is the fault of either the pupil or teacher.
Scottish Parent Teacher Council
January 2005