Looking into motivation, particularly for learning, certain elements appear again and again. So I’ve heard ‘relevance’, ‘meaningfulness‘, consequences, and more. Friston suggests that we learn to minimize surprise. One I’ve heard, and wrestled with, is curiosity. It’s certainly aligned with surprise. So I’ve been curious about curiosity.
Tom Malone, in his Ph.D. thesis, talked about intrinsically motivating instruction, and had curiosity along with fantasy and challenge. Here he was talking about helping learners see that their understanding is incomplete. This is in line with the Free Energy Principle suggesting that we learn to do better at matching our expectations to real outcomes.
Yet, to me, curiosity doesn’t seem enough. Ok, for education, particularly young kids, I see it. You may want to set up some mismatch of expectations to drive them to want to learn something. But I believe we need more.
Matt Richter, in his well-done L&D conference presentation on motivation, discussed self-determination theory. He had a nice diagram (my revision here) that distinguished various forms of motivation. From amotivated, that is, not, there were levels of external motivation and then internal motivation. The ultimate is what he termed intrinsic motivation, but that’s someone wanting it of their own interest. Short of that, of course, you have incentive-driven behavior (gamification), and then what you’re guilted into (technically termed Introjection), to where you see value in it for yourself (e.g. WIIFM).
While intrinsic motivation, passion, sounds good, I think having someone be passionate about something is a goal too far. Instead, I see our goal as helping people realize that they need it, even if not ‘want’ it. That, to me, is where consequences kick in. If we can show them the consequence of having, or not, the skills, and do this for the right audience and skills, we can at least ensure that they’re in the ‘value’ dimension.
So, my take is that while we should value curiosity, we may not be able to ensure it. And we can ensure that, with good analysis and design, we can at least get them to see the value. That’s my current take after being curious about curiosity. I’d like to hear yours!
Great post Clark, and reflective of things that I’ve been pondering for a while, too.
This does make me wonder – given that you say the area we ought to target is “need”, which itself falls under extrinsic motivation, does that change your thoughts at all on your prior article, “Is Intrinsic Motivation a Myth”?
https://blog.learnlets.com/2020/03/is-intrinsic-motivation-a-myth/
I mean, obviously it exists as a “thing”, but it comes back to the questions I had at the time I tweeted that article to you. If we can rarely tap into it as designers and instructors, and even then only with a small set of people, it effectively doesn’t matter whether or not it exists because we can’t reliably take advantage of it.
DM, no, it doesn’t change my view. According to the diagram, what I was (and am) talking about is internal motivation. I think we can reliably tap into the need, if not the want. As someone on LinkedIn commented, we shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the ability to affect intrinsic motivation as well. And I do think there’s a role for curiosity, I’m just finding it harder to think about systematically engineering it. And that may be a limitation on my part. Matt was talking about using self-determination theory, building relatedness, mastery, and autonomy, but that’s not content specific, and I’m working on trying to bring out a motivator from the topic of learning. Still sorting it out, obviously. Maybe time for another post ;). Thanks for the feedback!
Interesting points to ponder, I have focused more on clearly articulating the WIIFM and if the value proposition is personal then the individual’s curiosity will drive the learning path to an additional degree however those are the content blocks that fall into the “nice-to-know” bucket rather than the “need-to-know”. Does make me think tho!