NIU Professor is Motivated by Motivation - Stephen Tonks

Stephen Tonks

How much do you agree with the statements “I really like to read” and “I am good at reading”?

According to NIU Associate Professor of Educational Psychology Stephen Tonks in the College of Education, these statements are typical of many assessments of reading motivation.

“Motivation is something inside or outside us that drives us to action, and reading motivation is that which drives us to read,” explained Tonks. “Motivation involves beliefs about one’s abilities, one’s values, and one’s goals.”

Tonks should know: he is an expert on motivation and reading.

Motivation is not only of central interest to educators and researchers working in education and in psychology; it is routinely mentioned by laypersons in everyday life. We often say that a student lacks motivation if they do not complete assignments, miss class, or would rather spend hours playing video games than studying.

“‘Motivation’ is an abstract notion that helps us to explain behaviors. But because it is difficult to observe, it is normally measured by behaviors and what people tell us, usually in surveys,” elaborated Tonks.

Therein lies a challenge.

“Most surveys use general statements that reflect people’s traits. And they are also devoid of context. So, when someone answers the question ‘How much do you like to read?’, their answer might not reflect the fact that they absolutely love reading romance novels but hate reading other genres. If given the opportunity, the person would probably want to answer the question with something like, ‘It depends,’” reflected Tonks.

Did you experience this conflict at all when you answered the question?

The lack of context in the assessment may lead to measurement error and relatively low correlations with measures of reading comprehension, at least compared to cognitive measures that are much closer to reading, such as vocabulary knowledge.

This led Tonks to rethink how to measure and study reading motivation.

He is now exploring a situational approach to studying reading motivation that gives more context to the questions.

In a recently published study, he and his colleagues gave students passages to read immediately before having them answer questions regarding their motivation. The passages gave the students a context in which to answer the questions. Some questions were about their perceived competence in reading (e.g., “How successful were you in understanding the passages?”) and others were about their value of reading (e.g., “How useful were the passages to you?”). The researchers also derived measures of inferences from answers to questions that were periodically asked as students read the passages (e.g., “What are you thinking?”). The participants also completed assessments of foundational reading skills (e.g., vocabulary, syntactic knowledge) and reading comprehension.

“Interestingly, we found that the measure of reading value predicted the number of inferences they generated, and the number of inferences predicted reading comprehension. Foundational skills predicted reading value and perceived competence. Not surprisingly, the foundational skills also predicted reading comprehension,” summarized Tonks.

This and other emerging research is highlighting the fact that motivational constructs are related to basic reading skills necessary for comprehension, lending support to the usefulness of a situational approach.

“It was exciting to see that the motivation items predicted performance above and beyond the cognitive-related measures,” said Tonks. “Most surveys measuring motivation do not predict performance as well as expected given the importance of the construct.”

When asked ways to increase students’ motivation in the classroom, he offered some advice to instructors:

•  Try to play down rewards (extrinsic motivators) and play up intrinsic motivators by giving students some freedom as to how they approach the task;
• Make the material more interesting or engaging to your students; ask yourself, “How would I feel about doing this?”
• Try to highlight how the material is relevant to students;
• Ask them about their perceived competence (self-efficacy). If it is low, the instructor may encourage them to try their best, help them see the tasks as doable, and consider starting with tasks they can accomplish. He also remarked that students who need a motivational boost might seek out a personal, long-term purpose in the class.

Tonks is indeed motivated to study motivation. He is busy with his research that also includes motivation in other cultures and summarizing research for a general audience that includes teachers.

About the author: Keith Millis is on CISLL’s executive board and is a Professor of Psychology at NIU.

2020: The Year of Crisis and Opportunity - Heather Bergan-Roller

Heather Bergan-Roller

In one episode of the The Simpsons, Lisa explains to Homer that the Chinese have the same word for crisis and opportunity. “Crisitunity!” Homer exclaims.

D’oh!

Even if “crisitunity” is not a real English word, the concept still applies to 2020.

The crisis of COVID-19 has hospitalized and killed hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Yet it offered research opportunities to CISLL affiliate Dr. Heather Bergan-Roller.

Bergan-Roller, an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at NIU, researches how instructors teach biological sciences and how it can be taught most efficiently.

“I use science to understand how to teach science most effectively,” explains Bergan-Roller.

Bergan-Roller became interested in the science of teaching when she was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Nebraska, researching how students think about complex cellular systems.

“I also studied how science is communicated to others, and how students value science communication,” elaborated Bergan-Roller.

Effective teaching became front and center when educators and students suddenly scrambled to adapt to virtual instruction in March of 2020.

Thinking quickly, Bergan-Roller and three other NIU researchers, Nicole LaDue (Department of Geology and Environmental Geosciences and CISLL affiliate), Nicole James (Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry), and Rachel Rupnow (Department of Mathematical Sciences) examined how tenured faculty in the Department of Chemistry adjusted to “going virtual”.

Headed by Rupnow, the project was recently published in the Journal of Chemical Education.

“We were interested in what changes did the faculty make to their courses and why,” explained Bergan-Roller.

They found that faculty often kept instructional practices from face-to-face teaching, but they also modified their teaching on the basis of student needs. For example, they recorded their lectures, modified lecture notes, and inserted polls in order to ascertain whether their students were learning. They also explored tools within Blackboard, struggled with how best to assess student learning, and sought advice from peers within their department and the experts in the Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning.

One recommendation from the study is that teaching units would benefit from an in-unit community of individuals who are invested in teaching and knowledgeable about various tools and pedagogy. Because each discipline has its own “personality” of pedagogy, some tools work better in some disciplines than others.

“Laboratory courses are very difficult to teach online,” remarked Bergan-Roller. “You can’t smell or hear the chemical reactions over the web. Some reactions produce a crackle sound, which does not communicate well over the web.”

Bergan-Roller also had another “crisitunity” moment in 2020, namely, the heightened focus on race and equity arising from the Black Lives Matter movement.

“I want to make instruction effective and a safe place for all students. We need to know how instructors achieve these goals.”

One goal of this research is to find ways to inclusively maintain students’ interest in biology and facilitate their learning of biological phenomena.

“Many students are surprised to learn that race is not a biological construct, it’s created in a social context,” explained Bergan-Roller. “There are biological reasons why we differ in how we look, but they are genetically small and superficial.”

Bergan-Roller, along with some members of the Inclusive Environments and Metrics in Biology Education and Research (iEMBER) Network, plans on surveying hundreds of undergraduate biology instructors across the United States this Summer.

“We want to know the instructor’s point of view on how to teach inclusively. I want to know what they do and why they do it,” remarked Bergan-Roller.

We at CISLL applaud Bergan-Roller’s and her NIU colleagues’ research. We hope that opportunities abound and crises retreat.

And perhaps “crisitunity” should be an English word, after all.



About the author: Keith Millis is on CISLL’s executive board and is a Professor of Psychology at NIU.