In the fall of 2004, Benedict College--a Historically Black College in Columbia, SC--began enforcing a new grading policy called Success Equals Effort (SE[squared]). Under this policy, students taking freshman and sophomore level courses were assigned grades that explicitly rewarded not only content learning ("knowledge" grade) but also…

The School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies at the University of Nottingham hosted the fifth annual conference in the "Innovative Language Teaching at University" series. Under the heading "Enhancing participation and collaboration" the conference, organised by Cecilia Goria, Oranna Speicher and Sascha Stollhans, took…

The author describes the implementation of a photo journal project and explains how it positively impacted diverse young adolescents, specifically three reluctant learners. In addition to increasing motivation and engagement in learning, the photo journal project built community in the classroom. This article shares practical ideas for…

This study was conducted to determine if the dissimilarity of cognitive style between the instructor and the student was related to student engagement in nine undergraduate classes. Kirton's Adaption-Innovation Inventory was used to measure cognitive style as a preference to a method of solving problems: either more adaptively or more…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between community college business faculty members' perceptions of their use of learner-centered teaching practices and their students' perceptions of their motivation to learn. Learner-centered teaching practices have been linked to students' motivation. This study used on-line survey…

The application of new technologies and media has changed the concept of teaching and learning, offering effective and attractive possibilities to the educational system, particularly to the learning of languages in specific contexts. Educators in general will agree on the importance of motivation as a key to success in language acquisition as it…

Learner motivation is a key to effective instruction and is critical to creating a successful online learning environment; yet, there is a paucity of theory and empirical research on how to create a motivating online learning environment. The purpose of the present study was to explore and describe the experiences of adult learners in a…

Empowered learners are more motivated to perform classroom tasks, and they feel more competent in the classroom, find the required tasks more meaningful, and feel they have an impact on their learning process. Previous work has concluded that empowerment is primarily influenced by teacher behavior, which is not consistent with contemporary…

Background/Context: Despite the importance of students' active engagement for learning, little is known about how teachers create environments that are supportive of students' positive motivational and learning-related beliefs, particularly at the high school level. Furthermore, most of the studies that have described teacher practices in relation…

Students' motivational beliefs and self-regulatory practices have been identified as instrumental in influencing the engagement of students in the learning process. An important aim of science education is to empower students by nurturing the belief that they can succeed in science learning and to cultivate the adaptive learning strategies…

Learning environments aim to deliver efficacious instruction, but rarely take into consideration the motivational factors involved in the learning process. However, motivational aspects like engagement play an important role in effective learning-engaged learners gain more. E-Learning systems could be improved by tracking students' disengagement…

Understanding the reality of students who aren't engaged in literacy, Kittle proposes nothing less than revolution. She asks you to evaluate whether your students read enough, write enough, and rewrite enough, then challenges: If not, what would you have to change to make that happen? She shares examples from her classroom, and leaves us with a…

Learning English as a foreign language (EFL), a highly valued skill in the Chilean marketplace, is an arduous and complex personal endeavor requiring high student motivation. Reflecting this challenge is the heightened anxiety among EFL students, whose work has been associated with historically meager results. Blended learning, the fusion of…

Guided by Green-Demers, Leagult, Pelletier, and Pelletier's (2008) assumption that amotivation (absence of motivation) is a multidimensional construct, we designed this study to investigate the influence of inadequate teacher-to-student social support on amotivation of high-school physical education students. Five hundred and sixty-six ninth…

Too often students perceive history as boring with no relevance to their lives. Although students describe history as boring, this does not seem to be the case with one aspect of social studies education--Holocaust studies. Courses about the Holocaust have grown in number in recent years; and classes are routinely full. Why do students choose to…