Strategies to enhance student motivation: A conceptual analysis

The traditional view of academics is that student learning should go beyond and even ignore assessment. The paper demonstrates that students are unlikely ever to have held this view and that academics have gradually come to accept this. There follows an analysis of Herzberg's motivation at work theory and how this may be applied to student learning. This leads to an understanding of the relationship between motivation for learning and motivation for assessment and points to ways that assessment may be expected to enhance learning. Strategies are developed for increasing the kind of learning motivation favoured by academics, but an argument is also made for the right of students to determine their own motivational priorities. Finally it is shown that the world of work may have something to learn from the world of learning. The conclusions are reinforced through the use of catastrophe theory to model change.