Enhancing Students' Engagement by Increasing Teachers' Autonomy Support

Engagement refers to the behavioral intensity and emotional quality of a person's active involvement during a task. Recognizing the benefits highly engaged people experience, we tested whether classroom teachers could incorporate the relatively foreign concept of autonomy support into their motivating styles as a way to promote their students' engagement during instruction. Teachers in an experimental group and teachers in a delayed-treatment control group received information and guidance consistent with self-determination theory on how to support students' autonomy. Over a series of 3 classroom observations, trained raters scored each teacher's autonomy support and 2 measures of their students' engagement–task involvement and influence attempts. Trained teachers displayed significantly more autonomy-supportive behaviors than did nontrained teachers. Further, the more teachers used autonomy support during instruction, the more engaged were their students. This was true on both measures of engagement.     

Providing a Rationale in an Autonomy-Supportive Way as a Strategy to Motivate Others During an Uninteresting Activity

When motivating others during uninteresting activities, people typically use extrinsic contingencies that promote controlling forms of extrinsic motivation. In contrast, we investigated a motivational strategy that could support another person's capacity to personally endorse and value the effort he or she put forth during the uninteresting activity. That strategy is the provision of an externally provided rationale when communicated in an autonomy-supportive way. In two studies, we tested and found support for a motivational mediation model, based on self-determination theory, in which the presence of such a rationale (vs. its absence) adds to participants' identification with the task's personal value which, in turn, explains participants' subsequent effort. These studies suggest that extrinsically motivated behaviors can become self-determined through the process of identification and that the promotion of this identification experience depends on the presence of a rationale that is communicated in an autonomy-supportive way.     

Analysis of precursors to multiply controlled problem behavior: A replication

We replicated Fritz, Iwata, Hammond, and Bloom (2013) by evaluating the efficacy of an experimental methodology to identify precursors to aggression displayed by an adolescent with autism spectrum disorder. Using their trial‐based precursor analysis, we identified seven precursors to aggression. Next, we compared the outcomes of separate precursor and aggression functional analyses and showed that both precursors and aggression were multiply controlled by the same variables.     

Identifying the neural substrates of intrinsic motivation during task performance

Intrinsic motivation is the inherent tendency to seek out novelty and challenge, to explore and investigate, and to stretch and extend one’s capacities. When people imagine performing intrinsically motivating tasks, they show heightened anterior insular cortex (AIC) activity. To fully explain the neural system of intrinsic motivation, however, requires assessing neural activity while people actually perform intrinsically motivating tasks (i.e., while answering curiosity-inducing questions or solving competence-enabling anagrams). Using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging, we found that the neural system of intrinsic motivation involves not only AIC activity, but also striatum activity and, further, AIC–striatum functional interactions. These findings suggest that subjective feelings of intrinsic satisfaction (associated with AIC activations), reward processing (associated with striatum activations), and their interactions underlie the actual experience of intrinsic motivation. These neural findings are consistent with the conceptualization of intrinsic motivation as the pursuit and satisfaction of subjective feelings (interest and enjoyment) as intrinsic rewards.     

Effects of adjusting DRO schedules on the reduction of stereotypic vocalizations in children with autism

The reduction of stereotypic behavior is important for individuals with developmental disabilities because it may interfere with learning new skills. A common procedure used to reduce stereotypic behavior is differential reinforcement of other behavior (DRO). A DRO schedule is a procedure in which reinforcement is delivered given the absence of a target response for a period of time. Although DRO schedules have been shown to be effective in reducing a variety of stereotypic behavior, empirical studies have not yet determined the most effective way to thin the reinforcement schedule. The current study examined the extent to which the relationship between the inter‐response time (IRT) and the DRO requirement affects the reduction of stereotypic behavior. Results of the current study showed the DRO requirement that was set to the 25th percentile of the IRT distribution was more effective in reducing stereotypic behavior when compared with a DRO requirement set to the 95th percentile of the IRT distribution. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Remembering pleasure and personal meaning from episodes of intrinsic motivation: an fMRI study

Motivation and Emotion - To decide whether or not to participate in an upcoming activity, people can use their memories of intrinsically-motivating or non-intrinsically-motivating experiences...     

Consideration of preference shifts due to relative attribute variability

This study examined whether, and if so by what mechanism, changes in relative attribute variability can elicit a decoy effect. We argue and demonstrate that when only the relative variability of the attribute values in the choice set are manipulated (i.e., a frequency-only manipulation), decoy effects are observed consistent with predictions made by the Context-Dependent Weighting hypothesis as formulated by Huber et al. [Huber, J., Payne, J.W., & Puto, C. (1982). Adding asymmetrically dominated alternatives: Violations of regularity and the similarity hypothesis. Journal of Consumer Research, 10, 31–44.]. On the surface, our results appear to contravene earlier refutations of the Context-Dependent Weighting model. However, additional results from explicit tests of the purported casual mechanism (i.e., context-dependent attribute weight changes) suggest that decision-makers’ perceived importance of dimensions did not shift in response to our manipulation, making the Loss Aversion model a more viable explanation. Finally, results from a written protocol analysis suggest that many decision-makers were unaware, or at least unable to accurately verbalize, the influence of the context. Most decision-makers purported that they had made choices on the basis of their a priori beliefs about the relative importance of attributes despite the fact that there was clear evidence of context effects. Overall, our results underscore the importance of gathering multiple types of evidence for preference shifts in order to fully understand the mechanisms underlying decision-making.     

The influence of correlations between noncritical features and reinforcement on stimulus generalization

One strategy to program for generalization is to vary noncritical features in teaching exemplars, thereby avoiding noncritical features from being highly correlated with reinforcement and thus gaining faulty stimulus control. In the current translational evaluation, 2 groups of adults of typical development were taught to respond to arbitrary stimuli with experimenter‐defined critical and noncritical features in a matching‐to‐sample task. The teaching arrangement used for 1 group programmed for low correlation between noncritical features and reinforcement; the teaching arrangement used for the other group programmed for high correlation between noncritical features and reinforcement. Participants in the former group displayed (a) faster acquisition of matching, (b) less variability in correct responding, and (c) a decreased likelihood of faulty stimulus control developing during training. The results contribute towards advancing the study of stimulus control and developing an explicit technology of generalization to better serve consumers of the application of our science.     

A grand theory of motivation: Why not?

Baumeister asks what a grand theory of motivation might look like, and he identifies the key problems, challenges, and opportunities that need to be considered in its pursuit. I address four of these challenges—how to define motivation, whether motivation is a state or a trait, the primacy of motivation in psychology, and the necessity to not only manage motivational conflict but also to vitalize motivational assets. I focus primarily, however, on the key obstacle that prevents a grand theory—our non-shared assumptions about the nature and dynamics of motivation. I suggest we capitalize on new advances in statistics, methodology, and technology to test what used to be untestable assumptions about motivation. Shared assumptions are necessary for a coherent science, and only a coherent science is capable of constructing a general theory.