The challenge facing teachers of GCSE exam classes this year is enormous: how do you prepare students for exams that you aren’t even sure will take place?
According to the guidance, exams should run as normal. But with question marks hanging over both the dates and content, there is unsurprisingly a lack of confidence in the 2021 GCSE and A-level exam series.
So what does this mean for the teachers trying to motivate their students?
We spoke to Martyn Standage, professor of psychology, health, and applied science at the University of Bath. He gave us his thoughts on the predicament that teachers and students find themselves in.
The term “motivation” stems from the Latin word “movere” and concerns what moves people to action. When we talk about “motivation”, we are discussing “why” people act and what energises and provides direction to behaviour.
Tes: Are all people motivated by the same things?
The short answer is “no”. Individuals vary in their motivation for differing activities and as a function of different social environments that they encounter. People have multiple motives for activities that are experienced simultaneously.
Tes: We know that the cancellation of the 2020 exams is still fresh in the mind of our new Year 11s and 13s. Although their exams are currently set to go ahead, how would you say the events of the summer have impacted on the motivation of these students?
The highly publicised issues with the emergency grading system put in place this year could serve to undermine student motivation, as well as provoke anxieties for some.
Yet research shows that students will engage with personally meaningful activities and persist in the face of adversity when high-quality forms of motivation are supported by classroom environments that facilitate optimal student learning, adjustment, and development.
How to plan to close the learning gaps for GCSE
When considering classroom environments, an important question arises in “how do we facilitate environments that promote a student’s autonomous motivation and deep learning?”.
To this end, research has shown that contexts conducive of student motivation and learning are supportive of the students’ own level of autonomy, competence and relatedness.
These environments include teacher-student interactions that aim to understand the students’ perspective, support improvement and mastery, provide meaningful rationales, engage student interest, address student questions, provide informational feedback, offer provision of optimal challenge, provide opportunities for meaningful choices, and offer opportunities for student ownership and initiative.
Tes: Many teachers might assume that after seeing how important the mocks were to the final GCSE grades of 2020 exams, for 2021 students this will motivate them even more to work hard for their mocks. Do you think this is true?
I think that there is some creditability to this assertion.
The importance of GCSE mocks may be accentuated in the current climate due to their importance to final grades, as well as for university admission. It is probably important to reflect on the motivational basis of exams/grades and the process more broadly when considering the effect of mock exams on student motivation.
Tes: Will the news that coronavirus isn’t going to ‘go away’ for the foreseeable future impact upon some students and their motivation to work hard in school?
The coronavirus pandemic has brought disruption and uncertainty to many. Data from more than 12,000 participants surveyed by the Office of National Statistics (ONS) between April and June this year showed 87 per cent of children to have been homeschooled. The average time 11- to 15-year-olds spent on schoolwork during this period was just 16 hours (and significantly lower when a child aged 0 to 4 years old was in the same house).
More than half of the parents surveyed reported that a child in their household was struggling to continue with their education at home, with 77 per cent of parents citing a lack of motivation as a key reason for this.
As we go through these challenging times, it is also important to remember that teachers are also faced with their own work demands, controlling job mandates, leadership styles, institutional pressures, etc, that can undermine their own motivation and subsequently that of their students.
Tes: If a teacher has a student who hasn’t worked throughout lockdown, and expresses the feeling that there is no point in working now as they have ‘missed too much’, is it even possible to now motivate them to work?
Yes. Key to re-engaging students with learning is the promotion of classroom environments that are conducive to supporting their autonomous motivation toward learning. Numerous studies have shown the advantages of need-supportive classrooms.
A particularly useful technique for those who are feeling left behind would be to focus on self-referenced learning. The focus here would be on the student improving on their own learning via effortful engagement and mastery of the materials as opposed to comparing their abilities and progression with their classmates. Evaluation and feedback would be private and based on personal challenge and progression that are linked to the students’ goals.
Tes: There is a stereotype that boys do well in exams because they are motivated by the short-term goal, and girls do better in coursework as they work hard all year round and then crack under the pressure of the exam. Does sex factor in motivation? Is this something that teachers need to think about when trying to motivate students?
This is an excellent question and one that is complex, especially when one also considers diversity in terms of students’ ethnicity, inequalities and religious values as well as differing types of schools.
Taking the motivation angle, the processes that have been discussed so far are invariant across age, cultures, life domains and sex. Therefore, and when applied to sex, existing data show that the same pattern of relationships among motivation-related constructs exist irrespective of being a boy or girl.
The manner in which autonomy, competence and relatedness are experienced in classrooms may differ for boys and girls, but their support for learning and development remain constant. A systematic programme of empirical research is required to address such issues as well as whether the prevalences of learning strategies are commensurate with sex stereotypes.
What we do know is that outcome-focused rewards do support a tendency for students to take the shortest route to that reward.
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