Mini workshop — Understanding motivation in research and practice

Improving recruitment and retention of students into the engineering disciplines as well as enhancing their learning experience is a high priority amongst engineering educators. To be successful, we cannot focus solely on providing high-quality content, but also how students approach such content-that is, we must consider students' motivation, and how their experiences in engineering education can shape their motivation. However, applying motivation research to engineering education can be quite daunting; there are many theories to master, each of which tackles different aspects of student motivation, and which can be difficult to integrate. What is needed is a guide that helps engineering education researchers and practitioners identify the theories that show considerable promise for engineering education and demonstrate how they might be applied, in theory and in practice. In this session, we will present three theories of motivation: self-efficacy, goal orientation, and future time perspective. We will provide a mini-lecture on each, and then work with the session participants to apply them to research questions and practical problems identified by the participants themselves. Participants will receive several instruments they can use in their own research and classrooms, as well as a brief bibliography covering each theory.