Why Motivation Matters in Assessment
And why assessment matters for motivation!
Assessment is often seen as a tool to ascertain what students know rather than as a tool to increase what students know. However, at 100% Assessment we believe that teachers ascertain how much students know so that they can promote further learning. Making inferences about what students have learnt is merely a stepping stone to this much more important endeavour.
However, assessment promotes learning even before an inference is made! This is due to the expectation of inference (which we wrote about here). The expectation of inference harnesses the power of motivation to influence students’ productive study behaviours.
When a teacher says that there is an assessment coming up, they expect the behaviour of students to change. They expect (or at least hope that) students will aim to succeed in the assessment to the best of their ability; they expect students will work hard towards the assessment; they expect that students will take their advice about how they can study productively. These expectations are written into cultural scripts which are triggered by the teacher announcing that an assessment is imminent. 1
Motivational effects also happen after the assessment has taken place, when the inferences made about the student are shared with them.
When the teacher tells students how well they have done in an assessment it may reinforce an identity and orientation towards the subject that has built up over months or even years. A student’s self-concept is susceptible to be influenced by the inferences made about them, for better or worse, which will affect their propensity to study in the future. The motivational effects of being judged are a consequence of inference.
Both the motivational expectation and consequences of inference can be, at least in part, influenced by the teacher to increase the likelihood that students will make productive efforts towards doing well in assessment tasks, and therefore promote learning. But teachers must understand the motivational levers available to them.
What do we mean by motivation?
Motivation is at the heart of all learning. It drives students to engage, persist, and succeed in their educational journeys. In the context of assessment, understanding motivation is essential to harness its potential to promote productive behaviours and meaningful learning.
However, there is little consensus about what the term ‘motivation’ means and what causes people to be motivated or otherwise. We will adopt a simple definition: ‘a process in which goal-directed activity is instigated and sustained’.2 In relation to assessment, this means the student’s tendency to work hard (instigating and sustaining study) to prepare for an assessment (success in which is the goal).3
Models of motivation abound, and many of them are too abstract or high-level to be useful to us.4 Roughly speaking, our approach falls within the Expectancy-Value Framework. This theory suggests that motivation depends on two factors:
Expectancy: The belief that effort will lead to success.
Value: The perceived importance or benefit of the task.
Both expectancy and value depend on the self: that part of our identity which translates basic psychological needs, motives, feelings, values, and beliefs into action.5 In the upcoming posts, we will discuss how assessment affects a student’s sense of self, and what happens when students are faced with the prospect of having judgements made about their performance. We will not delve deeply into motivation theory; our goal is to provide teachers with a handrail for decision making rather than an in-depth exploration of the human psyche.
Motivation is not a character trait
There are many misconceptions about motivation which can lead to teachers making false assumptions about students. When teachers observe that students in their classes make varying levels of effort, they might attribute this to some character trait of the individuals. They might describe hard working students as ‘high achievers’ or ‘keen’, whilst using terms like ‘lazy’ or ‘disengaged’ for those who do little. Such attributions are unhelpful and probably incorrect. Human behaviour is rarely attributable to a simple trait.
If we were to observe a student engaging in various activities in their daily lives, we would notice that their effort levels vary considerably from one context and task to the next. For instance, we may note their reluctance to visit their elderly uncle but enthusiasm for watching a sporting event they have been looking forward to. Similarly, students will respond differently in school from lesson to lesson and day to day. To think of a quality such as a student’s level of motivation as fixed and constant is misleading.
Rather than a fixed character trait, motivation is context, situation and domain specific. When it comes to studying, a student may be motivated to study at one time and not another, towards one goal and not another, in one subject and not another, or for one test and not another. Motivation’s mutability makes it a worthwhile subject of teachers’ attention.
Putting motivation to work
Hopefully, we have given you a sense of why motivation matters so much to those interested in assessment. If the ultimate goal of assessment is to promote learning, understanding how it affects motivation is key.
Teachers should think carefully about what they do and say before and after an assessment, and how assessments combine over time to create a sense of momentum and success.
Elwood, J., & Murphy, P. (2015). Assessment systems as cultural scripts: A sociocultural theoretical lens on assessment practice and products. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 22(2), 182-192.
Schunk, D. H., & DiBenedetto, M. K. (2016). Self-efficacy theory in education. In Handbook of motivation at school (pp. 34-54). Routledge.
The type of motivation we are interested in is sometimes called ‘achievement motivation’, that is the process of instigating and sustaining effort towards achieving a goal. Test-taking motivation is a specific form of achievement motivation. For a fuller discussion of these terms, see: Eklöf, H. (2010). Skill and will: test‐taking motivation and assessment quality. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 17(4), 345–356. https://doi.org/10.1080/0969594X.2010.516569
For a comprehensive overview of theories of motivation in education, this paper is well worth your time: Urhahne, D., & Wijnia, L. (2023). Theories of motivation in education: An integrative framework. Educational Psychology Review, 35(2), 45.
Paraphrased from the above paper by Urhahne, D., & Wijnia, L. (2023) which credits both:
McCombs, B. L., & Marzano, R. J. (1990). Putting the self in self-regulated learning: The self as agent in integrating will and skill. Educational psychologist, 25(1), 51-69.
and, Roeser, R. W., & Peck, S. C. (2009). An education in awareness: Self, motivation, and self-regulated learning in contemplative perspective. Educational psychologist, 44(2), 119-136.