The Cambridge Handbook of Motivation and Learning

Book Preface

How do you motivate your children to study in school and university, inter-act with friends, find a nice profession that interests and satisfies them, and stay honest and healthy, all at the same time? There are wide-ranging (and sometimes wild) opinions on this, ranging from generously pampering and bribing them via coaching and tutoring to the carrot-and-stick approach and the somewhat radical tiger moms. We all have our ideas about how to induce motivation for learning, how the two are related, and how to improve each. In addition, there are plenty of cultural prejudices and folk psychology that may have the best of intentions, but ultimately may not go far enough for the demands of modern societies built on evidence rather than irrational beliefs. What is needed is a coherent scientific approach that assures humane, rational, thoughtful, flexible, and open procedures. In these modern times, this approach should involve evidence derived from studying the properties of the underlying hardware, which in these cases is the brain. The current collec-tion of chapters is exactly that. A number of psychologists, educators, and neuroscientists have written about their thoughts and draw on their empirical research to analyze the evidence, make predictions, and give advice.

Motivation is a funny thing. If you have too much, you may go around in circles, and if do not have enough, you cannot fulfill your dreams and inten-tions (and those of your parents and friends). You can derive motivation from rewards that you get from having done something well, and you may try again and again to get more of the reward. Reward is a powerful goal of motivated behavior and reinforces it. In particular, surprising rewards will make you go for more; they are often more efficient than rewards that are predicted. Goethe once famously said, “Nothing is harder than a succession of fair days.” Surprise generates attention and interest; it motivates you to get more of it. Thus, surprising rewards are good motivators. They are also very effective for learning. Once you get a surprising reward, you want more of it, and to do so, you may need to change your behavior, which is exactly what learning is all about.

But rewards are not the only motivators. Punishing an underperforming child reflects a general intuition that children will do things to avoid punish-ment and that punishment is a motivator. When it comes to carrot and stick, a good reward will go a long way, but sometimes a little pushing can help (although, luckily enough, the proverbial stick no longer exists in its phys-ical implementation). Another big motivator is novelty, which also attracts attention. Has there ever been a child that did not seek novel things? The child’s drive is the curiosity that acts to seek out unknown things. But where children are full of curiosity and just love the novel stuff, we adults often avoid it as much as possible. As Douglas Adams, the author of the The hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy, famously quipped, “Anything invented after you’re thirty- five is against the natural order of things.” Adults just cannot understand how children always seek novel things. Let us give them a chance!
Of course, as with everything important and good, motivation has enemies. How can our children stay motivated in the presence of the great distractors, such as prejudice (class paranoia: only the rich can make it), social interaction (it is too tempting to play with others, rather than sitting down alone and studying things), celebrity (no higher effort required other than posturing and talking useless rubbish), and asset inequality (why do they have what I can’t get?). Some children just do not understand why they need to spend time and effort to achieve something that may turn out to be beneficial only at some future point, when others seemingly can be big, famous, and rich without the effort. The social media on the Internet tells them so! The children are too young to anticipate the consequences of their compromised motivation.
All of the above could be interpreted to say that the brain is responsible for all of these behaviors. Yes, there are hardware systems for reward, punish-ment, attention, and curiosity, but these systems are not all that hard-wired. They are amenable to modification through experience, one of the great feats of neuroscience. Hopefully you will find it interesting to read about what is now available in the quest for understanding and improving motivation and learning. Happy reading!

Wolfram Schultz University of Cambridge

Introduction
Motivation and Its Relation to Learning
Suzanne E. Hidi and K. Ann Renninger

This volume brings together chapters that address present understanding of motivation and learning, as well as the relation between them.1 Neuroscientists, learning scientists, and developmental, educational, and social psychologists have contributed chapters, in which they describe research on motivation and learning, its potential to contribute to practice – both in and out of school – and future directions for inquiry.

Historically, research on motivation explores conscious as well as uncon-scious (implicit) responses to social and cultural circumstances, the will to engage (connect, participate), the influence of feelings about the self (self- concept, self- efficacy) and the work needed to address those feelings (self- regulation, self- motivation). It includes whether and when information search, rewards, incentives, or choice are operative, as well as the contributions of interest and internal motivation, curiosity and boredom, and goals and values.

Research addressing learning is similarly broad, in that it encompasses a wide range of foci. It addresses how and when individuals engage their attention, recognition and recall memory, and information processing (self- specificity, perception, affordances), as well as the acquisition and use of learning strategies. Research on learning also considers outcomes that can range from sustained participation and interest to achievement and deeper learning.
Even though motivation and learning are always mutually supportive, research that considers their relation has tended to focus on how motivation contributes to learning. For example, researchers have shown that (a) proxi-mal goals motivate individuals, leading them to increased effort and improved performance (e.g., Bandura & Schunk, 1981; Zimmerman & Kitsantas, 2002); (b) developing and well- developed interests facilitate learning (e.g., Harackiewicz et al., 2008; Jansen et al., 2016); and (c) rewards contrib-ute to increased attention and have cognitive benefits, such as improving memory for events due to enhanced dopaminergic activity in the midbrain and hippocampus (Adcock et al., 2006; Anderson et al., 2011). Researchers how unmotivated learners, in particular, can be enabled to meaningfully engage with content.
Consideration of how and when motivation can support learning is espe-cially timely, as declines in students’ motivation, interest, and value for aca-demic subjects have been widely reported in recent years (Frenzel et al., 2010; Hidi & Harackiewicz, 2000; Hyde et al., 2016; Rosenzweig & Wigfield, 2016). In fact, in their review of the literature, Lazowski and Hulleman (2016) con-cluded that declines in student motivation span grade levels, beginning in elementary school, and are a systemic problem that threatens educational equality.

Furthermore, attention is needed that focuses on how the development of learning may change motivation. Some scholars have recognized that knowl-edge acquisition – even when it is not voluntary – can have positive motiva-tional outcomes. For example, having students take physics courses that they would not choose on their own may expose them to ideas that promote learn-ing and voluntary re-engagement.

Emerging neuroscientific work helps us explain why motivation functions as it does and, specifically, how it contributes to learning. One of the best exam-ples of such findings – one that is reported in several chapters of this volume – reveals information- seeking to be an intrinsic reward that activates the reward circuitry in the brain just as extrinsic rewards do. This finding is critical for explaining the way motivation can lead to learning without extrinsic rewards. As Hidi (2006, 2016) pointed out, the relevance of neuroscientific findings has tended to be underestimated by social and educational psychologists, par-ticularly in the area of motivational research. Indeed, many educational and social psychologists have argued for skepticism about how neuroscience can be relevant to educational practice and policy (e.g., Bruer, 1997).
Thus, although neuroscientific research has examined a plethora of issues about the human brain that are relevant to motivation and learning, the findings from this literature, by and large, have not been integrated with psy-chological research. For example, Rushworth et al. (2011) defined the areas of the brain that are critical in learning about reward associations, select-ing reward goals, choosing actions to obtain rewards, and decision- making. This article is not cited in many papers on these topics in the motivation literature. Another example is the neuroscientific research on the reward cir-cuitry: the literature on this topic contains hundreds of investigations that only recently have begun to be seriously considered by learning scientists and psychologists.

The importance of neuroscientific research has become obvious in the last two decades, and specifications of neural substrates of information processing have led to findings that behavioral investigations have not been in a position to provide. The benefits of linking neuroscientific research to domain- specific educational investigations are many. For example, De Smedt et  al. (2010) demonstrated the relevance of cognitive neuroscientific research for mathe-matics education. Neuroscientific examinations are now able to provide infor-mation about the way that various circuits in the brain are activated. As such, they provide more direct observation of motivation than was available when Kanfer (1990) wrote that motivation is not directly observable and suggested that we can only observe behavior and infer motivational processes. In turn, the learning sciences – and developmental, educational, and social psychologists – are positioned to provide neuroscience with information about variables on which to focus their studies: which variables, in which contexts, have already been identified as critical, and open questions that neuroscience may be in a position to address (De Smedt et al., 2010).

Describing the scientific and pragmatic challenges of bridging education and neuroscience, Varma et al. (2008) suggested that neuroscientists and edu-cational researchers should view themselves as collaborators, rather than com-petitors, in the pursuit of knowledge. This handbook has been compiled in the spirit of this suggestion.