Students who say that they cannot be bothered to engage with a task are not necessarily the ones that end up “unsuccessful”

When Rachel sends me something, I read ;-) If students, in their second week at university, say that they “can’t be arsed” to do an in-class exercise — will they persist at university, and succeed? Or does success depend on other factors than their motivation? And how should we, as teachers, react?

These are the questions that Prowse and Delbridge (2013) set out to answer. They use a scale to measure “academic motivation” to study that seems to be built around self-determination theory (beautifully summarized here by Mattias Lundmark) — how much autonomy and competence do students experience (note — no relatedness in here)? Especially, how much internalisation of extrinsic goals, how much commitment to internalizing them, do students report?

Interestingly, the students that do best (in terms of grades and expected progression) only score higher than the other students on exactly the identified regulation — having acknowledged that engaging in an activity is something they should be doing because it is good for them, no matter whether they feel like they want to or not (similarly to “eat their greens”). The authors say those students seem to be saying “I am not going to enjoy this experience, but I know it’s good for me so I’d better just get on with it“. This is different from findings in other studies where intrinsic motivation is correlated to eventual success, and while this might be due to all kinds of reasons including relatively many men in this sample, there are things we can learn from it as teachers: While we of course can and should always try and support conditions for intrinsic motivation (i.e. work on feelings of autonomy, competence, and relatedness), we should also consider how to make use of controlled motivation in a good way, e.g. using students’ goal orientation to support their learning, rather than hoping we can make learning enjoyable and meaningful in itself for everybody, and acknowledging that motivation is “dynamic, context-sensitive and changeable” (Maclellan 2005 cited in Prowse and Delbridge 2013).

Prowse and Delbride (2013) conclude that “we cannot assume that a student who says “I can’t be arsed” will or will not find motivations that are sustaining for them through the “jungle of intelligibility” or that there will be a magic bullet that teaching staff can use to trigger these“. And to make it even more clear — even though we might feel that we want to give up on students that tell us to our face that they cannot be bothered (and especially early on in their studies), we really should not assume that they will drop out and be gone soon anyway (not that we should do that with any student). They might well stick it out and do well, just not the way we had assumed that “a successful student” would approach university. So time to check our assumptions, and how our assumptions influence how we work with students!

P.S.: Featured image: My desk while I am reading this article. The Christmas star is still up in February, yes, because I cannot be bothered to take it down. Maybe some extrinsic motivation is going to happen one day, who knows, or even intrinsic?

Prowse, A., & Delbridge, R. (2013). I can’t be arsed” A small‐scale exploration of students’ self‐reported motivation on entering a course of study and eventual “success. Education+ Training, 55(7), 654-664.