Designing contributing student pedagogies to promote students' intrinsic motivation to learn

Abstract

In order to maximize the effectiveness of our pedagogies, we must understand how our pedagogies align with prevailing theories of cognition and motivation and design our pedagogies according to this understanding. When implementing Contributing Student Pedagogies (CSPs), students are expected to make meaningful contributions to the learning of their peers, and consequently, instructors inherently give students power and control over elements of the class. With this loss of power, instructors will become more aware that the quality of the learning environment will depend on the level of students’ motivation and engagement rather than the instructor's mastery of content or techniques. Given this greater reliance on student motivation, we will discuss how motivation theories such as Self-Determination Theory (SDT) match and support the use of CSP and how CSP can be used to promote students’ intrinsic motivation (IM) to learn. We conclude with examples of how we use principles of SDT to guide our design and use of CSP. We will particularly focus on how we changed the discussion sections of a large, required, sophomore-level class on digital logic and computer organization at a large, research university at relatively low-cost to the presiding class instructor.

Keywords:

• intrinsic motivation
• contributing student pedagogies
• motivation
• computer architecture
• theory

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the class instructors who gave us access to their classes and the IM section TAs who did such an excellent job in teaching their students. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under grant DUE-1140554. The opinions, findings, and conclusions do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or the author's institution.