Motivations Toward Learning

Currently, this department faces a double retention problem:

1. We do not retain a sufficiently high percentage of our students.
2. The students we retain don't retain a sufficiently high percentage of what they've been taught.

It would be easy to cure either one of these retention problems by giving up on the other one. The challenge is to cure both.

We have established that grades are insufficient motivation to get most students in the lower segment of the curve to put forth the effort necessary to succeed in the CS&E programs. It should be noted that for students in the upper segments of the curve, grades are mostly a ``carrot''. For those in the lower segments, they are a ``stick''. So what other possibilities exist? Consider:

• fun,^5.1
• recognition for good work (e.g., gold stars),
• a sense of competition (e.g., whose code can survive whose test cases and/or debates^5.2),
• choice, or perhaps just the illusion of it
• participation (e.g., as a mentor or in pair-programming).^5.3
• graded but unweighted materials (e.g., practice exams).

In casinos, some players are drawn to the slot machines, where they can lose anonymously but win with great fan fare. By contrast, others are drawn to the gaming table, where they sense interpersonal competition.^5.4

Around 500 BC, Confucius observed:

I hear... I forget.
I see... I remember.
I do... I understand.

1300 years later Benjamin Franklin echoed Confucius:

Tell me, and I forget.
Teach me, and I may remember.
Involve me, and I learn.

See [R26] for some excellent ideas on how to involve students in class. There is a lot of information in management studies on motivating employees, e.g., [R19]. See [R27] for a discussion of academic dishonesty, espcially its legal aspects.