USC Rossier School of Education researchers have been examining the role motivation plays in learning in the classroom.

The research group known as Motivation, Instruction, Cognition, Language & Literacy was formed by Robert Rueda and Gisele Ragusa two years ago. It includes USC doctoral students as well as faculty from the University of California, Santa Barbara, California State University, Los Angeles, and California State University, Fullerton.

The group ultimately aims to provide professional development for teachers and intervention programs for urban youngsters based on the latest knowledge on reading engagement and student motivation. Members of the group engage both in joint projects involving the entire group as well as smaller collaborative and individual projects in this general area of research.

Over the past two years, members have conducted focus groups and surveys with teachers regarding their understanding of students’ motivation to read, and they also have examined the reading and motivational profiles of students in urban school settings. Their work, which has been presented at the American Educational Research Association and at the National Reading Conference, will appear in forthcoming publications.

Rueda and Ragusa currently are leading the group’s current work – measuring what teachers actually understand about student motivation and what types of motivational profiles struggling urban readers exhibit.

The research group surveyed teachers within six urban school districts over the past 18 months. Results of that study will be in Reading Psychology this spring.

“The government has poured a tremendous amount of money into reading at the national level, but they’ve focused on cognitive strategies related to reading and ignored motivation mostly,” Rueda said.

“For whatever reason, historically, we’ve separated motivation from learning, and the field is coming to realize they’re tied together. You can teach someone cognitive strategies to be a better learner, but if they’re not motivated, it doesn’t matter.”

With the overwhelming focus on basic skills, for instance, children get a lot of practice learning how to pronounce words, but when they get to the third or fourth grade, many do not understand what they are reading, Rueda said, and many see no value in reading.

Preliminary results on how much teachers know about student motivation are a mixed bag, Ragusa and Rueda observed.

“Teachers come with a broad set of reading instruction experiences,” Ragusa said. “These experiences guide them in their beliefs and in instructional decisions.”

“Some (teachers) do think of motivation as a trait – either you have it or you don’t,” Rueda noted. “Some teachers have a tendency to rely on the notion that the way to affect motivation is to reward kids with extrinsic things, like points or stickers. That’s not the most powerful way to affect motivation, because when the rewards disappear, so does the motivation.”

Rueda said research shows motivation is a whole constellation of beliefs about how hard a task is, how useful it is to do and how competent one is to do it. Motivation consists of persistence, effort and choice, he said, and it is related to the level of interest and value one places upon a given task.

Currently, the approaches educators are trained to take with unmotivated children can initiate a downward spiral for already struggling students and be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“When kids fail and teachers perceive they have a motivation problem, they will just lower their expectations or stop trying altogether, and when those kids fail, they feel less competent and try less and less, and attribute it to the fact that they are less smart,” Rueda said.

English Language Learner students, for example, tend to do worse in schools, he said. When they fail, they are often given repetitive tasks and more structured activities.

“With low-achieving kids, schools will reduce their autonomy and give them less choice,” Rueda said. “We know autonomy impacts motivation… It can be very motivating for people to have some say in what’s going to happen – they have a sense of investment and control. Kids are no different.”

In a related study, the researchers conducted six focus groups in urban schools with various teachers, with those results to be submitted to journals in the coming months.

Further research was conducted with a series of motivation- related studies of struggling readers in urban schools. Those findings will be submitted for publication as well.

Ragusa said the group has found differences in motivational profiles of urban learners that often relate to achievement or might affect achievement. These differences were found in spite of the fact that this group appeared to be homogenous.

They also discovered that, in some cases, students who were labeled as “struggling” readers in their schools actually showed up as average to slightly above average achievers once a battery of assessments were conducted, she said.

“Accordingly, multiple means of measuring students’ reading achievement in an effort to create a profile of readers is helpful in yielding comprehensive information,” Ragusa said.