Motivation is an outcome of success

Owned by Lesley Goddard
Last updated: Aug 29, 2024
2 min read

Don’t you mean success is an outcome of motivation?

No. Culturally - especially with the rise of neoliberalism - many people believe that increasing motivation gives rise to greater success, but that isn’t what research shows.

Mihaly Cziksentmihalyi's contribution to understanding learning - pointing out that motivation is the outcome of success, rather than what is commonly believed: learners must provide motivation before than they can be successful - is to my mind so simple, and yet so powerful.

Flow – The Psychology of optimal experience, Mihaly Cziksentmihalyi, Harper, 1990

  1. High stakes, summative testing reduces motivation of low attaining learners. Getting tough?

  2. We are wasting schooling time when we test learners on skills we know they won’t know yet. Assessment for learning is far too powerful learning tool to be used merely to find out if learning has happened. (see 0:49)

  3. We reduce the probability of feedback being successful, if we give too much feedback at one time.

  4. When we assess and give feedback and a mark or grade - learners focus on the mark or grade, not the feedback. Inside the black box

How timely practice helps increase motivation

timely practice was written to 

  1. Reduce the need for testing, we make assessment for learning low stakes and we reduce the need for future pre assess by tracking how new learning is embedding, that is we do assessment of learning, that is assessment of retrieval practice. During the pre assess process we encourage the teacher to explain to the learner its purpose is to find out what the learner knows and what the teacher should teach next, not to judge the learner.

  2. We want learners to get over 80% of their timely practice retrieval practice questions correct - so that feedback requirements will be low (and therefore within the time constraints of lessons) and so feedback is likely to be successful. Hence we sometimes we need to reduce the number of layers which are regularly requiring feedback.

  3. However we encourage teachers to discourage learners from giving themselves a score on their retrieval practice assignments.