Handbook of psychology volume 7 educational psychology

MOTIVATIONAL PROCESSES

During the last quarter century there has been a revolution in

thinking about how academic learning and achievement can

be motivated in classrooms. There are now a number of spe-

cific motivating, instructional approaches that are defensible

based on well-regarded educational research.

Rewarding Achievement

The behaviorists contended that to increase behavior, one

should reward (reinforce) it. It is not quite that simple! If the

behavior is one that the student does not like or is not doing,

then providing reward for performing the behavior (or for

performing the behavior well) is defensible. Alternatively,

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Teaching Processes in Elementary and Secondary Education

however, if it is a behavior that a student likes already (i.e., a

behavior the student finds intrinsically rewarding), then

providing an explicit reward can actually undermine the

student’s future motivation to do this activity (Lepper &

Hoddell, 1989). This phenomenon is called the overjustifica-

tion effect (Lepper, Greene, & Nisbett, 1973): There is a nat-

ural tendency when a person is rewarded for doing something

to explain one’s behavior as being caused by the reward. As

an example, consider a child who really loves reading and

reads plenty of books just for the fun of it. Suppose one day

the teacher adds the explicit reward of a pizza certificate for

reading so many books, an incentive system used in many

schools. As long as the pizza certificates keep coming, the sit-

uation is fine; alas, however, in the spring, when the pizza

certificates stop as the incentives program winds down, read-

ing might actually decline: The child stops reading because

she or he now believes that reading was occurring because of

the reward for reading.

One common form of reward in classrooms is praise,

which can be very effective. Praise works best when it is given

contingent on desirable student behaviors, when the teacher

makes clear what was praiseworthy, when the praise is sin-

cere, when there is an implication that the student can be sim-

ilarly successful in the future by exerting appropriate effort,

and when the praise conveys the message that the student

seemed to enjoy the task or value the competencies gained

from the exertion of effort (Brophy, 1981).

Encourage Moderate Risk Taking

Many students fear failure and hence are afraid to take risks.

Good teachers encourage such students to be reasonable risk

takers. Such risk taking, however, often produces increased

achievement (see Clifford, 1991). Why? Consider writing as

an example. Students have no chance to improve their writ-

ing skills if they refuse to try to write, fearing that their efforts

will be unsuccessful; improvement can occur only after stu-

dents try to write.

Emphasizing Improvement Over Doing Better

Than Others

Most American classrooms emphasize performance—in par-

ticular, doing better than other students on academic tasks.

Only a few students receive As relative to most students, who

are much less successful. Such an approach undermines the

motivation of all students (Ames, 1984; Nicholls, 1989),

however. Those who do not receive As feel as if they failed

relative to the A students. If the A students could do better

than they are doing, they have no incentive to do so, for they

are already earning the top grade that is available.

There is an alternative to emphasizing competitive

grades—to praise students for improving from where they

are now rather than for performing better than do other stu-

dents. Classrooms that emphasize improvement, in fact, are

more likely to keep students interested in and committed to

school (Nicholls, 1989; Nicholls & Thorkildsen, 1987).

Cooperative Learning

Beyond downplaying competition, students can be encour-

aged to cooperate with one another, with reliably positive ef-

fects on achievement. Students often learn more when they

work together (e.g., Johnson & Johnson, 1975, 1979, 1985).

The most motivating situation is one in which students actu-

ally receive reward based on how well their fellow group

members perform, creating great incentive for students to

work together to make certain that everyone in the coopera-

tive group is making progress (Fantuzzo, King, & Heller,

1992; Slavin, 1985a, 1985b).

Cognitive Conflict

Providing students with tasks that are just a little bit beyond

them or a little different from what they already know is very

motivating. Thus, if a student has the single-digit addition

facts down (e.g., 5

ϩ 2 ϭ 7), single-digit subtraction prob-

lems might be intriguing and just a bit confusing. Thus, pre-

senting a flash card with 5

Ϫ 2 ϭ 3 might give the student

motivation to pause to figure out why the answer is not 7,

raising curiosity about that

Ϫ and what that dash might sig-

nify. Similar curiosity would not be expected in a child

who did not know the addition facts already, for there would

be no reason for such a child to think that 5 

Ϫ 2 ϭ 3 is a lit-

tle strange. A variety of Piagetian-inspired educators (see

Kohlberg, 1969) have made the case that students’ curiosity

can be stimulated by presenting new content that is just a

little bit different from what the students already know.

Making Academic Tasks Interesting

People pay more attention to content that is interesting—a

good reason to present students with content that will grab

them (e.g., Hidi, 1990; Renninger, 1990; Renninger &

Wozniak, 1985). That said, sometimes material grabs student

attention but distracts from what is really important. For ex-

ample, juicy anecdotes in a history piece can reduce the at-

tention paid to the main points of the article (e.g., stories

about Kennedy playing touch football with the family on the

White House lawn can be remembered better than can the

Motivational Processes

159

accomplishments of the Kennedy administration, which were

the main focus; e.g., Garner, 1992). Similarly, educational

computer games are often loaded with distractions that suc-

ceed in orienting student attention to lights and bells rather

than to the content that the program is intended to teach (e.g.,

Lepper & Malone, 1987). On a more positive note, reading

can be made more fun by having the students read books that

they find interesting. Similarly, social studies and science

content can be illustrated by examples that students find in-

triguing rather than boring—examples that illustrate well

important points made in the text. 

Encouraging Effort Attributions

Students can attribute successes and failures they have experi-

enced to a number of factors. Unfortunately, most of these at-

tributions are to factors out of their control. Thus, explaining

one’s success as due to high ability or one’s failure to low abil-

ity is tantamount to attributing outcomes to something the stu-

dent cannot control. Luck is also out of the student’s control,

so that to attribute a success to good luck or a failure to bad

luck is to conclude that one’s educational fates are not under

personal control. Finally, explaining good and bad grades as

due to easy and difficult tests is the same as believing that edu-

cational success is all in the hands of the test makers. Explain-

ing successes and failures in terms of such uncontrollable

factors undermines motivation. If success in school depends

on ability, luck, or test difficulty, then there is no incentive to

try because successes and failures will occur unpredictably.

Alternatively, students can explain their educational out-

comes in terms of the one factor they can control—their effort.

Explaining successes as reflecting hard work—and failures as

due to not enough work—wields positive motivational power.

The message is that doing well depends on personal effort,

which the student can decide to expend. Encouraging students

to make effort attributions increases their motivation to learn

new skills that are taught (e.g., Carr & Borkowski, 1989).

Emphasizing the Changeable Nature of Intelligence

A related point is that students can believe their academic in-

telligence is fixed and out of their control, with this belief

undermining motivation to work hard in school. Alterna-

tively, students can believe their intelligence is modifiable—

that by learning more, people really became smarter (e.g.,

Henderson & Dweck, 1990). In fact, when classrooms em-

phasize that school is about mastering what is being taught

there and such mastery produces intellectual empowerment,

achievement is greater (e.g., Ames, 1990; Ames & Archer,

1988; Nicholls, 1989).

Increasing Student Self-Efficacy

People with positive academic self-efficacy believe they can

do academic tasks; academic self-efficacy is often quite spe-

cific (e.g., believing that one can achieve in mathematics—or

more specific still, believing one can do even difficult word

problems; Bandura, 1977, 1986). High self-efficacy moti-

vates future effort (e.g., a student who perceives she or he can

do math is more likely to try hard in math; Schunk, 1989,

1990, 1991). Self-efficacy is largely a product of success in a

domain (e.g., success in mathematics produces math self-

efficacy). Hence, it is important that students be successful in

school and that assignments provide some challenge but not

so much as to overwhelm. 

Encouraging Healthy Possible Selves

It is academically motivating for a child to believe that she

or he could go to college and eventually become a well-

respected, well-rewarded professional. Such students have

healthy possible selves, which motivates them to work hard

in school as part of a long-term plan that will get them to a

productive role in the world (Markus & Nurius, 1986). Many

children do not have such understandings or such positive

possible selves, believing that higher education is something

that could never happen to them and that they could never

achieve valued roles in society. For children who do not

have healthy possible selves, it makes sense to encourage

more positive views about possible long-range futures. For

example, Day, Borkowski, Dietmeyer, Howsepian, and

Saenz (1994) were able to shift the expectations of Mexican

American children upward through participation in discus-

sions emphasizing how education can result in desirable jobs.

Discussion

Educational researchers have identified many specific ap-

proaches to motivate academic effort and achievement. One

reading of this section is that these mechanisms are in compe-

tition with one another—that there are so many of them that it

would be impossible to carry them all out. Jere Brophy (1986,

1987), however, proposed just the opposite—that trying to do

it all with respect to motivation is exactly the way to produce

more motivating classrooms and more motivated students.

Brophy urged teachers to model interest in learning and com-

municate to students high enthusiasm for what is going on in

school and that what is being learned in school is important.

Brophy urged keeping achievement anxiety low and empha-

sizing learning and improvement rather than outdoing other

students. Teachers should induce curiosity and suspense,

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Teaching Processes in Elementary and Secondary Education

make abstract material more concrete, make learning objec-

tives salient, and provide much informative feedback. Accord-

ing to Brophy, teachers also should adapt tasks to students’

interest, offer students choices whenever possible, and en-

courage student autonomy and self-reliance. Learning by

doing should be encouraged; tasks that produce a product are

especially appealing (e.g., class-produced big books). Games

should be part of learning. The case is made later in this chap-

ter that Brophy’s perspective that teachers should try to do

much to motivate is enjoying support in the most recent re-

search on classroom motivation, with exceptionally engaging

teachers doing much to motivate their students—that is, excel-

lent teachers know much about how to motivate their students,

and they use what they know.

TEACHERS’ KNOWLEDGE, BELIEFS,

AND THINKING

The cognitive revolution heightened awareness that teachers

actively think as they teach and that what they know and be-

lieve about teaching very much affects the classroom deci-

sions they make. During the last two decades of the twentieth

century, there were substantial analyses of what teachers

know and believe (see Borko & Putnam, 1996; Calderhead,

1996; Carter & Doyle, 1996; Clark & Peterson, 1986;

Reynolds, 1989; Richardson, 1996); what follows in this sec-

tion is an amalgamation of conclusions from these previous

reviews of the evidence.

Teachers think before they teach (i.e., they plan for the

year, this unit, this week, what will be covered today, and

what will be covered in this lesson; Clark & Yinger, 1979),

and they think as teaching proceeds (e.g., they react to student

needs). Teachers also can think after they teach, reflecting on

what went on in their classroom, the effects of their teaching,

and how their teaching might be improved in the future. All

of this thinking is informed and affected by various types of

knowledge possessed by teachers: Teachers know how to

teach, having learned classroom management strategies, in-

structional strategies, motivational techniques, and a variety

of theories of learning. They have beliefs about themselves

as teachers. They have subject matter knowledge, including

knowledge about how particular subjects can be taught (i.e.,

pedagogical content knowledge; Shulman, 1986).

With respect to every type of knowledge that teachers can

possess, there are individual differences between teachers

in what they know and believe. For example, some teachers

know more than do others about cognitive strategies instruc-

tion. Among those knowledgeable about cognitive strategies,

some believe that strategies should be taught directly,

whereas others think that students should be helped to

discover powerful strategies but not be told explicitly how to

carry them out. Some teachers even know about strategies

instruction but choose not to teach strategies because they

do not believe that reading comprehension really is a con-

sciously strategic process (e.g., Pressley & El-Dinary, 1997).

Teacher beliefs can powerfully affect teaching, including be-

liefs about self as teacher (e.g., I’m not good at teaching

math.), the nature of students (e.g., They don’t want to learn.

The students do not have much prior knowledge that can be

related to science lessons.), effective classroom management

(e.g., Students should be seen and not heard. A good teacher

is clearly in charge of the classroom. In a good classroom,

students are self-regulating.), and the nature of effective

teaching and learning (e.g., Teachers should be coaches more

than dictators. Students learn best through direct instruction.

Students learn best when given opportunities to construct

their own knowledge.).

A teacher’s knowledge is acquired over a long period of

time, with some of it reflecting information garnered from ex-

periencing kindergarten through college education as a stu-

dent. Some was conveyed formally in courses in college—for

example, education methods courses. Other knowledge was

acquired on the job as a function of gaining experience in the

classroom, observing other teachers, and experiencing profes-

sional development provided to teachers in the field. Teach-

ers’ practical knowledge of schools dramatically shifts with

experience. Only through actually teaching in a working

school can subtle knowledge of the teaching craft be acquired.

Formal knowledge of teaching, however, can transform as

teachers attempt to use modern conceptions of teaching and

learning compared to conceptions of teaching and learning

that predominated when they were taught. Thus, knowledge

of writing can change as a function of experience as a writing

workshop teacher of composition. The shift can be from a

focus on writing as mastery of mechanics (which was the em-

phasis during schooling for many who are now teachers) to

writing as a process of planning, drafting, and revising (which

is the current focus of most curricular thinking about compo-

sition), with concerns about mechanics most prominent as the

composition product is being polished. Knowledge of and be-

liefs about mathematics instruction can change when a school

district decides to move away from curricula emphasizing

procedural learning to curricula emphasizing student con-

struction of mathematical understandings and real-world

problem solving. To become an expert professional takes a

while (5–10 years; e.g., Ericsson, Krampe, & Tesch-Römer,

1993)—both to learn how to teach and to believe one can

teach well—despite the fact that while they are in teacher ed-

ucation programs, many are very confident (probably over-

confident) that they will be good teachers (e.g., Book &

Freeman, 1986; Weinstein, 1988, 1989).

Expert Teaching

161

EXPERT TEACHING

That teachers have much to learn themselves has stimulated

much hard thinking about what experienced teachers know

and need to know—especially what really good teachers

know and believe. By analyzing the thinking and teaching of

experienced and skilled teachers, an understanding of teach-

ing at its best is emerging. A possible reading of the research

summarized briefly in this section is that a teacher can possess

many bits and pieces of knowledge that can mediate discrete

teaching events. The research reviewed in the next section

goes far in emphasizing that real teachers, however, connect

their knowledge and their practices to create entire lessons,

school days, content units, and years.

Cognitive psychologists have carried out many expert-

novice comparisons, especially focusing on the thinking of

experts compared to novices as they do important tasks (e.g.,

reading X rays, flying planes; e.g., Lesgold et al., 1988). Ex-

perts think about problems in a way very different from that

of novices. Experts quickly size up a situation as roughly like

others they have seen—that is, they have well-developed

schemas in their domain of expertise (e.g., expert radiologists

know what metastatic adenocarcinoma of the lung looks like,

and this knowledge is quickly activated when they confront a

specific X ray having some of the features of metastatic

adenocarcinoma of the lung). After a candidate schema

is generated, the expert then carefully searches for informa-

tion confirming or disconfirming the schema (e.g., noticing

whether the many tumors in this X ray of the lung are more

round than spiculated, which would be consistent with

metastatic adenocarcinoma; noticing whether there is a

metastatic path from the primary tumor). The novice might

not be so thorough and thus might rush to a conclusion (e.g.,

concluding quickly that the many tumors in the lung field

must be adenocarcinoma, perhaps even explaining away

the spiculated look of the tumors as due to the poor fidelity of

X rays). Also, unlike the novice, the expert radiologist is not

going to be distracted by irrelevancies (e.g., looking at sec-

tions of the X ray that do not contain telling information).

Cognitive psychologists interested in expert-novice differ-

ences in cognition consistently were able to demonstrate that

experts had better developed schematic knowledge in their

domains of expertise; this knowledge was used more system-

atically and completely by experts compared to novices to ac-

complish tasks in the domain of expertise. 

The most prominent expert-novice work done in the field

of teaching was carried out by David Berliner and his associ-

ates (e.g., Berliner, 1986, 1988; Carter, Cushing, Sabers,

Stein, & Berliner, 1988; Carter, Sabers, Cushing, Pinnegar, &

Berliner, 1987). They studied both teachers identified by their

schools as expert teachers and early-career teachers. For

example, Sabers, Cushing, and Berliner (1991) had teachers

watch a videotaped lesson, with the wide-screen image

capturing everything that was happening in the room. The

teachers were asked to talk aloud as they watched what was

happening; the researchers also posed some specific ques-

tions about what was happening in the classroom, probing

teachers’ understanding of the classroom routines, the content

being covered, motivational mechanisms being used by the

teacher, and interactions between students and teachers.

The main result was that the expert teachers saw the room

much differently from the way the novices saw it. Basically,

the experts made better interpretations of what they saw and

were more likely to recognize well-developed routines, to

identify classroom structures the teacher had put in place, and

to detect student interest and boredom. The experts also took in

more of the room rather than overfocusing on one part to the

exclusion of another. The experts listened more to what the stu-

dents said, whereas the novice teachers were more likely to

focus on the visual clues alone. Berliner and his associates con-

cluded that expert teachers have well-developed knowledge of

classroom schemas: They know what particular routines look

like (e.g., entering the room and getting to work immediately),

the important approaches to curriculum and instruction (e.g., a

hands-on science activity), and prototypical ways in which

students and teachers can interact (e.g., cooperative learning);

this knowledge base permits them to interpret what can seem to

be many disjointed activities to novices who lack such knowl-

edge. Thus, novices are likely to focus on the many specific be-

haviors in a hands-on science activity rather than simply

recognize it as a unified activity. Such schemas allow much

more complete comprehension and memory of what is going

on in a classroom (e.g., Peterson & Comeaux, 1987).

A criticism of these studies is that expert teaching is not just

about teacher thinking. In fact, it is mostly about actual teach-

ing, which was not captured at all in the expert-novice studies

focusing on teacher cognition. In a series of studies conducted

with our associates (Bogner, Raphael, & Pressley, 2002;

Pressley, Allington, Wharton-McDonald, Block, & Morrow,

2001; Pressley, Wharton-McDonald, et al., 2001; Wharton-

McDonald, Pressley, & Hampston, 1998), we captured the

many ways in which the teaching of excellent elementary

teachers differs from the teaching of more typical and weaker

elementary teachers. In each of these studies, we identified

teachers who were very engaging (i.e., most of their students

were academically engaged most of the time) and those who

were less engaging (i.e., students were often off task, or the

tasks they were doing were not academically oriented). As we

anticipated, when engagement was high, there were also indi-

cations of better achievement (i.e., students wrote longer,

more coherent, and generally more impressive compositions;

students read more advanced books; students performed better