Key factors that influence students’ motivation to learn: Implications for teaching

Multiple motivation factors work together to influence how students learn and achieve. Motivation can be enhanced by instruction that supports learning-related expectancies of success and strengthens perceptions that learning is useful. It also helps to keep in check students’ beliefs that learning involves unreasonable effort, emotional, or opportunity costs. This article provides a set of strategies that teachers could use in their instruction both to strengthen students’ confidence in their abilities and their utility/relevance beliefs, and to reduce their perceptions that learning requires incurring significant costs. These strategies, which are based on insights from both conceptual and empirical research, including our own research, could also help teachers reflect on their pedagogical practice.