The Easiest Way To Increase Motivation In Grad School

The easiest way to increase your motivation in grad school is to let go of the idea that motivation for challenging tasks is something that can instantaneously be increased, decreased, or sustained.

I often see posts about motivation and learning, and I'm usually dismayed at how oversimplified these posts make motivation seem.

"Motivation and positive self-beliefs guide action by focusing learners' attention, influencing their choices, and increasing the perseverant effort needed to solve complex problems and reach challenging goals" (Usher & Schunk, 2018, p. 28)

Motivation is perhaps one of the biggest areas of research in educational psychology. And while it wasn't the main topic of my research, I attended a conference dedicated solely to motivation, and attended many presentations on this topic. Additionally, many other grad students in the same research lab were studying motivation.

If I had to summarize motivation, I would provide this list (adapted from Butler, Schnellert, & Perry, 2015, p. 166) so that you get a sense of how complex and multi-faceted motivation can be for grad students:

Motivation includes:

• Beliefs

• Goal orientations

• Mindsets

• Interest

• Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation

• Task value

• Outcome expectations

• Self-efficacy

• Causal attributions

Becca and I talk about attribution theory and self-efficacy in episode 3, season 2 of the podcast. We also talk about goal orientations in the soon-to-be-released episode 5, season 2.

So, if you are finding that you are experiencing motivation challenges in grad school, first of all, I want to let you know that you are not alone, and that it may take some time, trial, and error to figure out how to increase your motivation for tasks in grad school.

But, this is why I talk so often about using self-regulated learning strategies in grad school because I believe this framework gives you options and steps on how to remedy low motivation, namely by understanding the task, setting specific goals, and choosing effective strategies based on those goals.

And, as you can tell, this is a big category that I have other blog posts on and podcast episodes, and will continue to write about because it is the most common challenge that grad students face.