Students' valuing of academic content impacts their engagement in learning and plays a pivotal role in shaping their future academic and career choices. Fortunately, practicing educators can integrate many readily applicable strategies into teaching to enhance students' valuing of academic content. Drawing from expectancy-value theory, Eric M.…

The study of classroom processes that shape students' motivational beliefs, although fruitful, has suffered from a lack of conceptual clarity in terminology, definitions, distinctions, and roles of these important processes. Synthesizing extant research and major theoretical perspectives on achievement motivation, I propose Motivational Climate…

We triangulated self-assessments of learning, course grades, and course evaluations from 28 students in a general education class to examine the effects of group work and perceptions of utility on learning, investigating three hypotheses: 1) self-assessments of learning provide triangulating information that deepens interpretations of traditional…

Self-regulation of learning involves developing metacognitive awareness (planning, monitoring, and evaluating) of (a) cognition-motivational beliefs, (b) behaviors-persistence, effort, engagement, and (c) affect-enjoyment, interest, and other emotions. Metacognitive awareness creates opportunities to exert metacognitive control as needed, which…

This article describes a 'research project' at a girls school where teachers wanted to improve their students' engagement and interest in mathematics. Conversations with the students indicated they thought mathematics was difficult but also repetitive and boring, with lessons that had little variety of tasks. While some students like to learn…

Many K-16 educators agree that active learning is a key component for student success in life sciences. At the same time, some instructors are frustrated by inconsistent student participation in these activities and may revert to traditional teaching strategies. Horse caregivers face a similar frustration when they lead a horse to water and it…

Motivating students towards language learning includes embedding meaningful themes, communicative tasks, and authentic assessments. When voice and choice are held as essential qualities of the task, students invest in the resources to make meaning and express their own thoughts, thus moving us away from traditional assessments that emphasize…

Motivation cannot be measured directly but has to be evaluated through other indirect measurements, of which questionnaires are the most common. This chapter presents the results from the development and use of a model to approach motivation in the science classroom from multiple theoretical and methodological perspectives. The model emerged from…

The purpose of this article is to explore the concept of student agency when applied to learning across "The New Zealand Curriculum" (Ministry of Education, 2007). To explore agency the author presents and describes a range of teaching pedagogies that are based on principles of intrinsic motivation. The author describes, with examples,…

Mathematics-related affect comprises an individual's attitudes, beliefs, emotions and motivations towards mathematics. These affective constructs have been widely studied in mathematics education and cognitive psychology and have been shown to be related to cognitive outcomes such as performance on a range of mathematical tasks. However, it is not…

Learning computer programming is a challenging task for most beginners. Demotivation and learned helplessness are pretty common. A novel instructional technique that leverages the value-expectancy motivational model of student learning was conceptualized by the author to counter the lack of motivation in the introductory class. The result was a…

Twenty-six learners of English enrolled in an MA course were asked to give the metaphors which they think best capture the essence of their learning experience so far. Their metaphors tell how English learning had introduced them to a brand new world and, once they were inside it, led them to a seemingly endless series of new discoveries. The…

The activity and method of teaching and learning identifies the input factors (students, teachers, instructional materials), the process (research, leadership, student services), and the output factors (employable graduates, knowledge creation and economic growth). Teaching and learning activity is also seen in the skills, attitudes and research…

Drawing on theoretical insights from a complex dynamic systems framework, this work explores the ways that learner selves, as they relate to learning and using languages, manifest across different contexts and timescales and emerge in interaction with various factors. First, a broad overview of dynamically-oriented L2 motivation research is…

The aim of this paper is to show the impact of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) by using WhatsApp with activities based on collaborative work, real time communication, and feedback. The relevance of presenting authentic material such as topics of students' interest combined with collaborative work is central for developing…