If there’s one word that I hear the most in my work with graduate students, it’s motivation.
Whenever I’m having these conversations with grad students, I’m always referring to my favourite article: Regulation of Motivation as a Component of Self-Regulated Learning by Dr. Chris Wolters that was published in 2003.
This article discusses some of the most effective strategies to regulate your motivation as a student. Throughout the summer, I’ll talk about the strategies in this article to hopefully give you some ideas as to how to increase your motivation as a grad student.
But first, what is motivation?
Admittedly, most of my knowledge about motivation comes from working next to motivation researchers, both in the research lab I was in during my PhD and at national and international conferences.
This is because I don’t think you can talk about learning without talking about motivation.
However, what that means is that I’m not an expert in motivation, but I do think I have a thorough understanding of the processes of motivation and specifically, how they can be regulated during learning in grad school.
Motivation researchers have contributed a lot to our understanding of this complex concept. In general, motivation includes many aspects, outlined in Zimmerman (2011), such as: goal orientation, interest, intrinsic motivation, task values, self-efficacy, outcome beliefs, future time perspective, volition, causal attributions, etc.
You already know that my expertise is in self-regulated learning (check out my other blogs on this topic here). So, in the lens of self-regulated learning, motivation is considered to be one of the many processes that students can actively regulate during learning. Thus, any aspect of the definition of motivation is included when we talk about regulating motivation.
Motivation can either be a product or a process (Wolters, 2003). When we consider motivation to be a process, it takes into consideration interest in the task/activity, levels of self-efficacy, desire to master a task, and or how these affect our behaviour.
Thus, regulating motivation means paying attention to the thoughts, actions, or behaviours that influence our choice, effort, and persistence for academic tasks (Wolters, 2003). There are many more nuanced descriptions of motivation, but the idea I’m trying to get across is that awareness of our motivation affects how motivated we are to do a task.
So, for example, I’ve previously talked about how I’m a novice at sailing. If I consider my motivation to learn to sail as a product or a state, then my motivation fluctuates considerably. I’m interested in sailing, but sometimes it’s hard for me to persist because sailing is really hard. Sometimes I choose not to attend my sailing lessons as a result (true story!). I’m often painfully aware of the variability in my motivation to learn to sail.
On one hand, I want to feel more comfortable on the water, have fun with my family and friends, and explore all the great spots around where I live.
On the other hand, I find sailing slightly terrifying and unpredictable and feel overwhelmed at the sheer amount of knowledge needed to be successful. It’s hard to have only my goals motivate me when other aspects are undermining that motivation.
In grad school, I was very motivated to write my dissertation and defend it in the spring of 2020. I showed up to a hidden computer lab on campus every day at 9:00 am for months in 2019 and into 2020 and steadily made progress. I wanted to finish my PhD, I wanted to transition to employment from being a student, I used motivation regulation strategies to show up and just write!
When I wasn’t as motivated, I try to work on tasks that were easier and when I was motivated, I tackled the harder tasks, such as feedback from my committee.
In conclusion, motivation is a process that requires effort and must be started by at least some minimal willingness to start and complete a task (Wolters, 2003). Then from here, using motivation regulation strategies can help regulate your motivation in grad school.
Here are the motivation regulation strategies I’ll talk about in more detail in future blogs:
Self-consequating
Goal-oriented self-talk
Interest enhancement
Environmental structuring
Self-limiting
Attribution control
Efficacy management
Emotion regulation
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