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By Adam J Braus — Founder and CEO of Conversera.com

The surprising science of motivation is being applied to business and human resources, but has not yet been applied to education. Here are 5 principles that I developed and used to motivate my clients and colleagues in corporate America and my teammates and customers in tech startups in San Francisco, and now use to motivate my students. 3 of the 5 are inspired from Dan Pink’s book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. If you are not familiar with Dan Pink’s book, watch this delightful and brief video to ‘prime the pump’.

Drive by Dan Pink

Applying these principles to a school or classroom requires no change to subject matter, learning activities, or learning assessments. To implement them only requires changes to class room management, extra curricular schemas, attendance, and especially the mathematics of grading. One or all of them can be implemented, and they motivate students more the more of them you use.

Please tweet feedback to me @ajbraus and #MotivationIsEverything

How Can We Motivate All High School and College Students?

1. Loss Aversion

Scientists have discovered that human beings hate to lose 4-5x more than we love to win. Or put another way: imagine you find $100 on the street. Feel good? Of course. Pennies from heaven. Now imagine you lost $20. Feel bad? Sure you do. Pearls before swine. The principle of Loss Aversion says that we felt as bad when we lost the $20 as how good we felt when we found $100. Loss Aversion can explain the mechanics of how grades can dramatically demotivate students and provide a way to fix grading so it motivates students instead.

Now, imagine you are an average student taking an average test at any school. It has some limit of points you can earn from taking it, say 100. Imagine you get 80 points out of 100. You got a B-. Not terrible — actually about average. However, according to the principle of Loss Aversion how do you feel? The formula looks like this:

-Amount Lost * Loss Aversion Multiplier + Baseline = How You Feel

So if you just lost 20 points. Multiply that by 5and you feel like you scored a big fat 0.

-20 points * 5 + 100 points = 0

The student should feel completely indifferent, and be neither more motivated to learn nor demotivated to learn. If you have met any B- average students you know this describes them perfectly.

Now imagine the A student taking the same test. They always gets +98 points, but today they get only 92 points. They are so distraught! But why? They only lost 8 points. However, to them 8 * 5 = 40 points off! They feel like they got a 60 when they usually fee like they got -2 * 5 + 100 = 90, meaning a 60 is a 30% drop from their usual performance. No wonder that they are so unhappy with that grade.

Now imagine the C or D student who scores lower than an 80. They actually feel like they scored lower than 0. A score of 65 points means you lost 35 points. Put into our little equation: -35 * 5 + 100 = -75. A D student, although holding a passing grade feels demotivated by -75 points. Anyone who lost more than 20 points feels quite literally like a loser.

So how can we use this knowledge of Loss Aversion to motivate students? Some radical educators suggest removing grades all together, but this is not necessary, instead simply Remove The Denominator.

Instead of making a test out of 100 just have a test with no upper bound. The simplest implementation of this solution is making tests with more questions than could be answered in the time allotted. A more sophisticated implementation would be adaptive computer based tests that also have more questions than can be answered. Another sophisticated implementation would be to make tests be kind of outrageously huge, like “Build a helicopter” or very subjective like “write a great novel.” In these cases there is no upper limit to how well the students do, no out of 100. Without the upper limit, by Removing The Denominator now students just get more and more points, they never lose points, and therefore never feel the barb of Loss Aversion.

So now a few big questions.

1. How do you get a grade for a student from an integer?

A simple answer is to grade students based on a curve.

2. But if you grade on a curve, how will anyone know if the students have mastered any of the material? Everyone could be flunking algebra together.

Here is the key discovery and consequence of Loss Aversion — if we are to avoid the demotivating effects of grades, and transform grading into an accurate and motivating way to assess learning, we must separate mastery and performance. On the one hand we must make pass/fail tests to track mastery of subject matter, and on the other, we must have grades be based on a curve for performance.

This is already beginning to occur with the prevalence of mastery tracking. So I call on all teachers of high school and college: #DownWithDenominators

2. Autonomy

Autonomy or Self Determination or Freedom are good in and of themselves of course, but also can be used strategically to motivate students. Giving people autonomy in intelligent ways can alter and improve their behavior and abilities. It can make them more energetic, curious, courageous — in a word— more motivated.

American’s are infatuated with “electives” but once the student’s butt is in the seat they have no Autonomy to choose what they learn or in what order. The only Autonomy they have is in their extracurriculars and social lives. In this light, its not surprising that most young people are much more interested in the two arenas where they have autonomy than in their school work where they have none.

A simple implementation of greater Autonomy is to take a vote on which subset out of a total set of units the whole class will learn and in what order. A more sophisticated implementation might be akin to Kahn Academy’s Skill Trees (also used in popular video games like World of Warcraft), where students can choose which mastery blocks they want to unlock by demonstrating mastery of prerequisite blocks.

A Kahn Academy Skill Tree for Mathematics

In the future all mastery will be be tracked like this, not because its prettier or more “fun” but because Autonomy and, as we shall see presently, a Sense of Mastery are so intrinsically motivating to students.

3. Prosocial Bias

Students, like all people, are biased towards behavior that reflects positively on their social status. The Prosocial Bias is one way to gain what Dan Pink calls “a Sense of Mastery” since it is gained through some sort of public recognition.

The Prosocial Bias is already used intentionally or not in a number of ways in schools. We shame bad behaving students. We give out demerits and detentions. Many students work just to get teachers to like them (this is the cause of a wonderful strategy in teaching: the “no smile before Christmas” principle). People study together socially.

So in what of ways can we leverage the Prosocial Bias to motivate students intentionally? Here are some brainstorms:

At the Board Demonstrations — Get students up in front of their peers to do demonstrations, presentations, and speeches. (If you have a preponderance of introverted students, have them work in teams and make sure the extroverts are spread out.)

Prefects— Give students official responsibilities for the maintenance of the school from planning events to monitoring the study halls or lunch hours of younger students.

Student Teachers— They say you don’t know something until you can teach it. Why not take the top masters and performers from the older grades and have them actually teach portions of classes for the lower grades? The top juniors and seniors could easily put together a module and cycle through the lower grades teaching for 20–30 minutes to each class supervised by the teacher. This would lighten the load for teachers, give the students a neat experience where a peer they look up to is teaching them and role modeling good behavior, and the student teachers would know their material frontwards and backwards and gain meaningful real life experience teaching.

4. Fair Competition

“5 Points to Gryffindor!”

Fair Competition is a scientifically proven motivator and another way to gain a Sense of Mastery. Why should the athletics departments get all the fun of fair and organized competition? Let’s bring it into the academics with a vengeance.

One simple implementation is to bring back Science Fairs and add to it a whole slew of other sorts of competitions to the mix:

Computer Software Competitions Robot Competitions Debate Competitions Writing Competitions Odyssey of the Mind, 4H, Model UN Music/Dance/Art Competitions Business Plan Competitions

I remember in high school, most guys thought about 10 times more about getting into the “200 Pound Club” than about their math grade. The 200 Pound Club was a big public list on the wall of the weight room of who had prove they could benchpress 200 lbs. Even weak guys who read philosophy in the spare time like me wanted to be in it! The weight room had all sorts of lists with 10–20 students on each list for things you could be good at — squats, vertical leap, bench press, bicep curl, etc. And people worked day and night to get onto their names onto these boards.

The principle of Fair Competition suggests public leaderboards for top performing and top mastery students will motivate students. I will warn here that putting up leader boards without separating performance and mastery will not work (due to Loss Aversion). However, with performance and mastery separated, public leaderboards will be very motivating. For example:

School Wide — Most Breadth in Math Mastery 12th Grade — Most Depth in Visual Art — (e.g. Annie Knickerbocker (‘16) in Photography) School Wide—Best Performance Overall (this is the one academic leaderboard we already have . . . No. 1 is suma cum laude!) Freshman Jack of all Trades — Master of Some (Freshman most breadth of performance over all despite mastery) School Wide Grand Masters (Most depth of mastery e.g. Joseph Starkey (‘15) in Math, Kelly George (‘16) in Writing)

There has been lots of criticism of “everyone gets a trophy” thinking, and rightfully so if a trophy doesn’t mean anything. However, everyone is the best at something in some way. With over 80 leader boards and 5–50 people on each one, at some point everyone would feel the esteem of being recognized for their good work in some way whether its their dedication to mastery in a single topic, or performing well all around. Very motivating!

Another powerful implementation of Fair Competition is to implement ‘houses’ inside a school like in Harry Potter. These are essentially academic teams each with their own colors and symbols and songs that ‘compete’ academically for a grand cup each year. They are given points by averaging their constituent’s performance and mastery and are penalized for the bad behavior of its individuals. Make each house have a political structure with a captain or president as well to motivate students with a bent for leadership. Such a social structure would give both a Prosocial Bias and a Fair Competition motivation to students to make each member of their house a success.

5. Sense of Purpose

It seems to me personally that the baseline of motivation of students that kept them even coming in to school is set by two principles: a Prosocial Bias wanting to make friends, please their parents, and have teachers they admire like them and a Herd Mentality dependent on the belief that everyone around you is going to school and you will die cold and alone in the street if you don’t. Everything above this baseline of motivation comes from a Sense of Purpose instilled by a great teacher. In fact, I’d venture to say that what we all mean by a “great teacher” now and in the future, is someone who has a talent and skill to communicate a Sense of Purpose to young people.

That being said, from the perspective of this post, a Sense of Purpose is the least revolutionary of these scientifically demonstrated forms of motivation. Nevertheless, it is now and forever the most important one.

Conclusion

These 5 principles and their implementations are meant to work without any major administrative change that requires permission. Avoid Loss Aversion (by Removing Denominators and separating performance grading and mastery tracking), give students the Autonomy to choose what they study or at least its order, leverage the Prosocial Bias, add in a heaping dose of Fair Competition, and of course teach and exemplify a Sense of Purpose.

Motivation in a student is everything because, in the end, a motivated student will be overall a good student and a good citizen, and a demotivated or apathetic one, the opposite.