This post was edited by PRAJUKTI Bhattacharyya on Jul, 2017

What are current strategies to help students learn? What are the tools? Current evidence about motivation?

This research is messier because of so many variables. Attitudes, self-efficacy, meta-cognition, self-regulated learning, learning styles/strategies

What are the different environments? Needs of various groups?

What is student motivation? How is that collected/measured? There could be a connection between motivation and the metric collecting the data.

Motivation is multi-faceted and how can it be defined? There are a lot of subgroups, eg. intrinsic, extrinsic,...

Past metric - MSLQ - shows motivation is incredibly important, but diminishes from beginning to end of semester

Many students are not really motivated but they need two lab sciences and geo seems easier.

How can we motivate on the first day; collect some sort of questionnaire (Why did you sign up for this class?...)? Exam wrapperrs

Research design questions need to be very specific. Constrain as many things as possible do that you can get an answer/identify a signal.

How do we make measurements in the classroom?
what about online classes? can check how often students sign-in and participate in online discussions

Need to identify life style factors (not really related to motivation) that explain certain behaviors such as doing homework early.

What are the things we do in the classroom to improve motivation or destroy motivation? How to test for motivation?

This post was edited by PRAJUKTI Bhattacharyya on Jul, 2017

--How to change student attitudes, what are the best practices, do not want to reinvent wheel, how do we get students to work as hard as we do in their learning process, (e.g., intro classes), how to get students engaged, think beyond grade. What motivates students? Different levels of interest (point of interest where they are self-motivated, asking questions, ect) - how do you get them there? How do you do so with large classrooms?

--Faculty do not feel have the skills to know how to address metacognition in the classroom or have enough time/knowledge to read the literature

--Understanding the diversity of motivations (intrinsic versus extrinsic) - how to bring EVERYONE in? How do we access?

--Scientists unfamiliar to be accessible to larger community

--How do we translate what we as an individual faculty may be doing to the larger dept/institution?

--How to really motivate students to engage with different levels of classroom activity? How to motivate when they have different levels of preparation?

--Want to give them the skills to improve motivation but then they can apply it to other content areas. Is this similar or different for major/non-majors?

--As practitioner of a 2yr college these skills are not in the content (books) embedded in courses but are the other skills that are important for learning/career success./How do we help students recognize that the skills they are learning are part of the learning process and that they can use them in many contexts?

--Rather than focusing on content what "tricks" am I using that can help them learn? (Expert/novice) - making it visible. How can I make the content serve skills building in metacognition/affect/etc

--Teach students how to make connections between pieces of information

--We need to teach them to learn.

Classroom examples:
--Asking students what they need to know? How will we know you got there?
--Have students make their own rubric
--Post exam - how much time did you spend studying? What did you do to prepare? - scaffold them in the course to modify their learning

Big IDEA: How do we take what the research knows metacognition/affect/self-regulated learning and best practices? How do we make these skills visible to the students? What does it look like to change culture at the institution to use these practices at a system wide level?