Research on teaching in recent years has awakened faculty members to the importance of cultivating intrinsic motivation in class. The idea is that, instead of relying on grades or late penalties to get students to complete their work, we should turn to more meaningful motivators: the inherent love of learning, the fascinating nature of the subject matter, the desire to belong to a community, the impulse to help others.
Those are admirable pathways, and they deserve the attention they have attracted from advocates of alternative grading, project-based learning, and other new teaching movements. To unleash your students’ natural love of learning, the thinking goes, you need to eliminate or downplay externally imposed incentives.
But that message has had the (perhaps unintended?) effect of turning more traditional forms of educational motivation — firm deadlines, grades, carrot-and-stick policies — into the villains of college teaching.
In fact, most work — especially the challenging and unpleasant parts — comes wrapped in both intrinsic and extrinsic motivators. For example, as director of a teaching center, one of us (Kristi) has to create an annual budget, a task she loathes. She knows that the work is necessary and will support the parts of her job that she loves — connecting meaningfully with professors and improving student learning. But those larger goals can feel very far away as she stares at spreadsheets.
The task gets accomplished every year as the result of two powerful extrinsic motivators: a deadline and consequences. The university requires a budget by a set date, and if it’s not produced, the teaching center would potentially lose funding, and eventually, after repeated failings at this essential task, she would be out of a job. Making budgets is an onerous task, and it gets done because of the intertwining of the intrinsic and extrinsic motivators.
That’s how most long-term, complex tasks get done — including the work of completing a major assignment, passing a course, or earning a degree. When you make extrinsic motivation the antagonist in your teaching strategies, you neglect a powerful tool that you could be using to support students in their sometimes arduous journey toward a degree.
What follows are some suggestions on how to embrace the power of extrinsic motivation in your teaching.
Use it to build relationships with students. A growing body of research suggests that meaningful relationships with faculty members enhance college success. In their 2020 book, Relationship-Rich Education, Peter Felten and Leo M. Lambert argue that connections with instructors, mentors, peers, and others are the single factor that drives an excellent education. We are firm believers in the value of relationships for learning, but we’ve seen how they form organically only in very specific circumstances, and primarily for students who are already on a fast track to success.
No matter how many times you tell students you’re available for office hours, you may still find yourself catching up on email during that time, while students seek answers on Google or ChatGPT. It would be far better for their learning to come see you with their questions, but any number of barriers (social anxiety, a rainy walk across the campus, the discomfort of asking an authority figure for help) can stop students from ever darkening your door. While holding office hours on Zoom or in common spaces like a student center can resolve some of those barriers, such steps may still not be enough.
Instead, we suggest requiring an office-hour visit as an early assignment in the course or in lieu of a first quiz. Depending on the size of your class, you might ask students to sign up for short slots as individuals or in groups of three or four. During these visits, your conversation could focus on getting to know more about a student’s background and interests. You could offer constructive feedback on an early quiz or assignment. Or you might ask students to come in with their biggest question from the first week of class.
However you manage the particulars, this is a great way to use an extrinsic motivator — in this case, points toward a final grade or a perfect quiz score — to encourage behaviors that lead to strong student-faculty relationships.
Attach incentives to reading assignments. How often have you lamented that students just don’t do the readings before class? Maybe you’re cynical about it (“they just don’t care”). Or maybe you empathize (assuming they were studying for another course or putting in more hours at work). Either way, you have the power to spur the behaviors you want to see.
If you believe it’s important for students to regularly read before class in order to succeed in your course, devote some piece of the final grade to exactly that — an argument made in a classic text, Effective Grading. Don’t just assign the readings, ask students to write a brief response to what they’ve read. They could write about the most interesting figure in a scientific article, about the weakest- and strongest-reasoned sections of an essay, or about which passage of a textbook chapter was most confusing and why. Use the first few minutes of class to have students write a response on paper, or ask them to submit their work online ahead of time.
Such assignments provide an explicit external reward for coming to the classroom prepared to have a thoughtful, meaningful discussion. In our experience, students often prioritize their homework and studying based on urgency and points available, so having even a small point value (in Kristi’s course, each daily reading response is worth 0.5 percent of the final grade, and is graded credit/no credit) can elevate your class readings on their priority list.
Give them a little push to participate. Class time brings its own set of options for extrinsic motivation. Many faculty members use quick discussion activities such as think-pair-share, because we value student participation and believe it will help students succeed in our course. We ask students to pair up and expect them to jump right in and start talking. But real barriers to participation exist for many students: digital distractions, social anxiety, or even just lack of sleep. For many students, the intrinsic opportunity to learn, even for the sake of a future exam, may not be enough of a motivator to participate.
Sometimes the solution is as simple as a nudge. Let’s say you’ve asked your 70 students to work on a complex problem in pairs, and about eight of them, largely sitting in the back, slouch down a bit and individually peck away at their laptops. Leverage a bit of light social pressure by moving around the entire classroom, and when you see someone actively avoiding participation, check in with them and encourage them to join a nearby pair. Or sit next to those students and ask, “What’s the first step you would take to solve this problem?”
You might also engage in what one of us (Jim) has described as “invitational participation” — a less intimidating version of “cold calling” — in which you let students know at the beginning of an activity that you’ll be calling on a few students to share their answer with the class. The knowledge that they may have to share their thoughts publicly is a powerful extrinsic motivator to use their time to develop the best answer they can.
Use points to keep students on track during major assignments. Both of us have long used what the literature describes as authentic assignments — i.e., asking students to apply what they’ve learned in tasks that mimic experiences they might encounter in their careers or lives beyond the campus. The hope is that such assignments will cultivate intrinsic motivation in students. For example, in Kristi’s upper-level neuroscience course, students complete a final project in which they develop a grant proposal on a course topic.
But even with the most carefully designed, creative, and “authentic” assessment, students might have many other priorities competing for their time, or they may struggle to overcome psychological or logistical hurdles.
When the fires of their intrinsic motivation have been temporarily extinguished, extrinsic motivation can help students stay on track. One solution is scaffolding — or dividing a major assignment into stages, with each one tied to due dates and consequences. Leading up to the final grant proposal, for instance, Kristi assigns students to write a brief topic proposal in Week 7, and draft an outline in Week 11 (worth about 2 percent and 10 percent of the project’s grade, respectively). Such incentives keep students moving forward on the assignment and give them the chance to incorporate her feedback into their final submission at the end of the term.
Working for points doesn’t make the assignment itself somehow less authentic or valuable. It’s simply using the structures of the class — and of college itself — to motivate students to do their work in a sensible, high-quality way.
Extrinsic motivators can be the bridges and boosts that students need as they encounter chasms or barriers along the way. We should always emphasize the glory of the final destination and create meaningful experiences along the way, but we should also not neglect to build the basic structures that enable student success. As you are planning your courses for the upcoming semester, don’t neglect the power of extrinsic motivation.
