Tag: ARCS Model for Motivation

Motivation in Education: Relevance

Woman Student Typing
This royalty free image comes from pexels.com.

Throughout this series, we’ve explored Keller’s ARCS Model for Motivation, which includes attention, relevance, confidence, and satisfaction—four components used in successful face-to-face, online, and blended learning environments.

In my last post, I shared different strategies to motivate students through gaining and maintaining their attention.

Today we’ll look at practical ways you can motivate your students through course content that’s relevant to them in and outside of the classroom.

How is this Relevant?

Keller (1987) believed that “relevance can come from the way something is taught; it does not have to come from the content itself” (1987, p. 7, author emphasis). He defines relevance as “a perception of personal needs being met by instructional activities or as a highly desired goal being perceived as related to instructional activities” (as cited in Chesebro & McCroskey, 2002, p. 83).

Chesebro and McCroskey expressed Keller’s definition in simpler terms: “we perceive something as being relevant if we perceive it is related to our personal needs (e.g., needs for affiliation, control, achievement) or our personal goals (e.g., career goals)” (2002, p. 83).

If students perceive your course content and activities as relevant to their personal needs, personal goals, or both, they will become motivated to learn and remember the course content long after your class ends.

Strategies to enhance content relevance include:

  • Value: Help students value course activities and make sure that they expect to succeed at the task.
  • Experience: Explain how the course content builds on students’ existing skills and knowledge; discover students’ interests and relate their interests to the course content.
  • Present worth: Explain why the course content is relevant and important.
  • Future usefulness: Explain how the course content relates to future activities and experiences that students will encounter, in and outside of class.
  • Need matching: Link the course content to students’ needs for affiliation, power, and achievement.
  • Modeling: Refer to alumni or professionals who demonstrate or model the value and relevance of the course content.
  • Choice: Provide meaningful alternative methods for accomplishing a learning outcome.
  • Engage: Ask students to determine why and how the content is relevant to them.

All of these strategies require “teachers to have some knowledge and understanding of their students” (Chesebro & McCroskey, 2002, pp. 88, 90).

One of my favorite Communication professors at Spring Arbor University helped her students recognize the value in class assignments. She showed us the future usefulness of the content we were learning, in and outside of class. In COM100: Introduction to Communication, our Relational Transformation assignments throughout the semester challenged us to improve our communication with others by intentionally communicating with people in new ways, or in ways that would challenge us to be better and more effective Christ-like communicators.

Once I saw how the course content was relevant to my personal needs and goals, I became more motivated to learn and remember the course content and as a result, excelled in my classes. I still apply the lessons I learned from those assignments in my communication with others to this day.

In my next post, I will discuss how to gain and maintain students’ motivation by improving their confidence.

Reference:
Chesebro, J. L., & McCroskey, J. C. (Eds.). (2002). Communication for teachers. Pearson.
Keller, J. M. (1987). Development and Use of the ARCS Model of Instructional Design. Journal of Instructional Development, 10(3), 2–10. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/30221294

Ann2

Motivation in Education: Attention

Engaged students at computers
This image has been shared under a creative commons license (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) via Jisc (https://www.jisc.ac.uk/blog/building-social-engagement-at-your-college-or-university-21-aug-2015).

In my last post, I introduced John Keller’s ARCS Model for Motivation. The ARCs model has practical application in face-to-face, online, and blended learning environments. To recap, Keller’s ARCS Model has four parts:

  • Attention
  • Relevance
  • Confidence
  • Satisfaction

This post focuses on how you can gain a student’s attention to increase and improve his or her motivation to learn.

Liao and Wang (2008) discovered that incorporating Keller’s ARCS model in instructional design and classroom instruction allows instructors to “early spot students’ learning problems and make an early instruction intervention to further appropriately modify teaching strategies to meet various learners’ needs” (p. 56).

Did you catch that? If used in course creation and instruction, Keller’s ARCS Model for Motivation helps teachers to be more aware of their students’ learning problems. This awareness helps you adjust the curriculum and your teaching style to meet their learning needs.

Gaining Your Student’s Attention

Chesebro and McCroskey (2002, p. 90) found that “making eye contact and smiling at students, calling them by name, and using vocal variety and appropriate humor” are effective strategies to increase and maintain students’ attention in face-to-face learning environments. The character, John Keating, exemplifies these teaching strategies in the film Dead Poets Society (Weir, 1989).

Morrison (2012) offers some key strategies to increase and maintain students’ attention in online and blended learning environments: “provide timely feedback on assignments, respond to students within 24 hours, include constructive and personalized feedback on assignments, craft a weekly message, acknowledge academic challenges, and comment strategically within the discussion boards.”

When my professors used these strategies, they increased and maintained my attention. In turn, my motivation to learn and do well in my classes increased as well.

For example, in my online MA in Strategic Communication program at Liberty University, one of my professors consistently responded to my questions within 24 hours or less. He provided timely and personalized feedback on assignments. His weekly announcements and videos prepared us for the topic(s) that week and reminded us of what was due. He asked questions and responded to students in the discussion board. By engaging students in the discussion board, my professor made the discussion lively and active—encouraging students to participate.

In my next post, we will discover practical ways to motivate your students by making your course content relevant to them in and outside of the classroom.

References:

Chesebro, J. L., & McCroskey, J. C. (Eds.). (2002). Communication for teachers. Pearson.

Jisc. (2015, August 21). [Gaining students’ attention]. Retrieved from https://www.jisc.ac.uk/blog/building-social-engagement-at-your-college-or-university-21-aug-2015

Liao, H.-C., & Wang, Y.-H. (2008). Applying the ARCS motivation model in technological and vocational education. Contemporary Issues in Education Research, 1(2), 53-58. http://arbor.idm.oclc.org/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eric&AN=EJ1056387&site=eds-live&scope=site

love2b1. (2007, April 14). Dead poets society-3 [Video file]. Retrieved from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EdWgsTUhmI

Morrison, D. (2012, August 31). How to motivate students in the online learning environment. Retrieved April 26, 2017, from Online Learning Insights website: https://onlinelearninginsights.wordpress.com/2012/08/31/
how-to-motivate-students-in-the-online-learning-environment/

authors-ann

Motivation in Education: Overview

motivation-imageMotivating students is one of the most difficult tasks for a teacher. Don’t believe me? How many students are like Jeremy in this Zits Comic? A student’s motivation does not rely solely on his or her own effort, but also on the teacher’s behavior and the way he or she presents content. John Keller understood this when he created his ARCS Model for Motivation in 1983.

As a student studying to be a professor, I cannot stress enough the impact Keller’s ARCS model has had not only on my motivation to learn but also on the way I plan to teach and motivate others. Keller’s ARCS Model can be practically applied in face-to-face, online, and blended learning environments. The model has four parts:

  1. Attention
  2. Relevance
  3. Confidence
  4. Satisfaction

A combination of the four elements increases and maintains student motivation in and outside of the classroom. Teachers can use attention, relevance, confidence, and satisfaction in their classrooms to help students become motivated, remember the content, and do well in class.

In his research, Dupont (2012) noted that Keller’s motivation principles:

“have been shown to be valid and stable over the years in virtually all cultures and at all levels of education, even though there are many differences in the practices used to achieve them” (p. 28).

The key phrase is “there are many differences in the practices used to achieve them.” The world of education is changing. Face-to-face is no longer the only type of learning environment and students’ learning styles are ever-changing. More and more students seem to be psychomotor (hands-on) learners rather than cognitive learners. Teachers need to be aware of these trends and adapt their instruction accordingly, depending on the subject that they teach and the students they are teaching.

Remember, there’s a myriad of ways to implement and apply Keller’s ARCS Model in your teaching style and lesson plans. Over the next few posts in my Motivation in Education series, we’ll look at each of the ARCS components so you can think about how you can implement and apply each of them in your learning environment—whether it’s face-to-face, online, or blended.

References:
DuPont, J. S. (2012). Nursing faculty motivation to use high-fidelity simulation: An application of Keller’s ARCS model (Order No. 3547010). Available from ProQuest Central; ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. (1267836282). Retrieved from http://ezproxy.liberty.edu:2048/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/1267836282?accountid=12085

Scott, J., & Borgman, J. (2016, January 3). [Motivation in education]. Retrieved from http://zitscomics.com/comics/january-3-2016/