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.

The Art of Reading and the Reading of Art – Christian Steciuch

Christian Steciuch

What do you think about the hourglass-shaped sculpture that lies between Founders Memorial Library and the Holmes Student Center on the NIU campus? During Spring, vines can be seen growing up its sides. Is the sculpture interesting? Pleasurable to view?

Did you know that its title is “Balance of Equality” and it is a tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr. and the principles and values that he stood for? Did you know that its artist, Dann Nardi, won a $75,000 prize for the work in 1991, almost 30 years before the Black Lives Matter movement?

Does knowing this information influence your liking and interest in the sculpture?

Christian Steciuch, a CISLL graduate student affiliate, thinks that it might.

Steciuch, a Ph.D. student in Psychology, was last year’s winner of the CISLL Outstanding Student Scholar Award (COSSA).

Steciuch is interested in factors that affect the understanding and appreciation of artwork.

Although art may not be typically associated with language and literacy, it is if we think of literacy in a broader sense.

“There are many similarities between understanding artworks and understanding the written word,” explained Steciuch. “In both cases, the reader or viewer must activate and integrate ideas from the explicit work and their world knowledge in order to create a coherent mental representation of the piece.”

Without the background information about the MLK sculpture, one might only activate the ideas of “hourglass” and “time” assuming the viewer even recognizes it as an hourglass. But with the added information, the viewer may activate and consider other ideas that could lead to a richer interpretation of the sculpture, connecting it to such concepts as race, equality, balance, growth, Martin Luther King and, perhaps, the forward-thinking nature of NIU.

“I am particularly interested in how background information in the form of accompanying text influences reactions to art,” said Steciuch. “By accompanying text, I mean information like who is the artist, when and where the artwork was created, the title, and other information that is typically conveyed beside paintings in a museum.”

He is currently planning his dissertation, which examines the role of inferences in appreciating art.

“Prior research has shown that accompanying text typically increases the viewer’s liking and interest in the work. One possible reason is that the text may trigger inferences about the artwork that would not be drawn without the accompanying text,” explained Steciuch.

His dissertation will ask questions like: Does the amount of accompanying text affect liking and interest? Which types of inferences matter? If accompanying text does affect the viewer’s reaction, what types of reactions are affected? And do these effects depend on the processing style of the viewer?

To assess processing styles, Steciuch, along with fellow graduate students Ryan Kopatich and Daniel Feller and NIU professors Richard Siegesmund (Art Education) and Keith Millis (Psychology), recently created a psychological inventory that measures people’s preferences for thinking about artwork.

“We found that some individuals do not like ambiguity in artwork. It elicits negative reactions. Others enjoy more complicated artworks, and still others seek out contextual information, like historical events, to make meaning from art objects. It is possible that accompanying information may increase appreciation by decreasing ambiguity and by providing a meaningful context,” described Steciuch.

Earlier this year, Steciuch published a paper in the American Psychological Association journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, which showed that when people move past their gut reaction to abstract artworks, their pleasure and interest goes up.

“Prior research had shown that when people are asked to create a title for abstract art, their interest in the artwork increases. In our paper, we showed that a similar finding occurs when the person is merely told that viewing art has cognitive benefits to the viewer. When people think about an artwork, they make connections in their mind, and for many, this is a positive experience, resulting in greater appreciation,” explained Steciuch.

Perhaps accompanying information serves to increase interest in a similar way—by activating ideas that the viewer can integrate with the art object.

We will need to wait for Steciuch to complete his dissertation for further answers. But in the meantime, maybe you’ll appreciate Nardi’s sculpture just a little more than you did before reading this spotlight.

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