The risk of implementing an approach to enhance motivation

In the Southern part of Norway, many secondary school pupils drop out due to lack of motivation. Our project aims to enhance pupils’ desire to learn and to complete their education. Here, we investigate possible change in motivation after implementation of an intervention. We specifically focus on pupils’ motivation for their subject, in this study: Norwegian. Meta-cognitive abilities and self-regulated learning have a positive effect on motivation. Therefore, we developed a five-step intervention to strengthen pupils’ self-regulated learning and meta-cognitive abilities. In the intervention, pupils define a) what prevents them from being motivated for learning and b) how they can overcome possible obstacles hindering their learning. Additionally, they discuss this with their peers and formulate their own learning approach to the subject at hand, thus strengthening their sense of autonomy and relatedness. Pupils’ motivation was measured at three time points across the school year (N=101, T1; N=76, T2; N=105, T3). MANOVA revealed that, over the course of the year, pupils became less intrinsically and more extrinsically motivated towards their subject, thus contradicting our expectations and previous findings. Although we aimed to target pupils’ intrinsic motivation, the implementation of our study may also have reduced pupils’ sense of autonomy, thus strengthening their external motivation and moving away from more student-centered learning