It's useless, too much and no one cares: How students make sense of feeling unmotivated

INTRODUCTION: Despite concerns about declining motivation and disengagement in pre-clinical medical education, research has largely focused on identifying factors that influence students' motivation. Less is known about how students make sense of their educational experiences as unmotivating. We explored how pre-clinical medical students make sense of feeling unmotivated, focusing on how they construct meanings around their educational participation. METHODS: We conducted an inductive qualitative study with 16 pre-clinical medical students. Participants created Rich Pictures depicting an experience of feeling unmotivated in the medical programme, followed by in-depth interviews. Data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis within a constructivist paradigm. RESULTS: Students' sensemaking was strongly shaped by emotions. Boredom, confusion and overwhelm could initiate meanings of educational activities as useless, the educational environment as no one cares and the curriculum as too much. These meanings could make educational participation feel frustrating, futile and stressful and contributed to a transactional attitude in which students participated primarily in exchange for something that would help them progress through the programme, such as a grade. CONCLUSION: We interpret feeling unmotivated as educational participation changing meaning: from participation in becoming the physician students envision to participation organised primarily around meeting institutional demands. Drawing on Communities of Practice, we understand this shift in relation to students' trajectories of becoming. Students' sensemaking was highly emotional and, in the absence of authentic medical practice, shaped by imagined futures. This perspective offers a different way of understanding student motivation and highlights the importance of educational experiences that help pre-clinical students experience their participation as meaningfully connected to becoming the physician they envision.