Kristy A. Robinson - MILES Lab - Blog

Kristy A. Robinson - MILES Lab

Zooming in on Instruction: Instructors' Strategies for Supporting Motivation & Engagement in Fall 2022

4/21/2023

Faculty Features Video Series

8/31/2022

As part of McGill Faculty of Education's Faculty Features Video Series, Dr. Kristy Robinson describes her research in achievement motivation. What causes students' motivation to decline? How can we better support students in different academic atmospheres to improve their motivation? How can we analyze teacher practices and students' perceptions to see how motivation is affected?

Students who are passionate about these areas of study and research should consider pursuing a Master’s or Doctoral degree within the Department of Educational & Counselling Psychology, under the astute mentorship of Dr. Kristy Robinson. To learn more: mcgill.ca/edu-ecp/kristy-robinson

Visual Notes from Kristy's Talk at McMaster Education & Cognition: Motivated Students & Motivating Classrooms

7/26/2022

Many thanks to Melanie Parlette-Stewart for this beautiful visualization, and to the conference organizers for the invitation!

AERA Motivation SIG Motivation Monday: Collaborative Research

4/15/2022

This was a super well-organized and fun conversation full of tips on forming and maintaining fruitful research collaborations. It was a great opportunity to reflect on the collaborations that I treasure! I also learned a lot from the other panelists and attendees. Thank you, Motivation SIG Graduate Students, for inviting me and for doing such a great job organizing!

Interview with Dr. Marcus Johnson, University of Cincinatti: Interest & Emotions in Education

3/26/2021

I had a blast speaking with Dr. Marcus Johnson about interest and emotions in education--check out our conversation here!

Full Recording: Supporting Student Motivation in STEM Courses: March 22, 2021

3/23/2021

This interactive event highlighted insights from an ongoing collaboration between MILES Lab and members of the Faculty of Science at McGill University. We focused on:

What is motivation?
How do we support motivation?
Why and how do students' motivational beliefs change during introductory STEM courses?

Many thanks to all who attended!

Motivation: Whose job is it, anyway?

3/10/2021

We often think of motivation as something we have or we don't. We think of students as being motivated or unmotivated.

Motivation experts have long moved beyond this way of thinking about motivation. We know motivation can vary in both quantity and quality, and we know motivation is a broad umbrella that is actually composed of many different beliefs. These beliefs act as sources of motivation (or the lack thereof) that drives effort, performance, strategy use, and all those good things we need for success.

More recently, we have begun to consider how motivation isn't just a personal, internal process. Instead, we acknowledge that each individual person is part of a larger eco-system of relationships and experiences that, together with that person's mind, shape how much and how well a person is motivated toward a given task in a given moment. This is called a situative approach to motivation.

This means that our experiences and interactions can actually change our motivation. This places the responsibility of motivating students not only on the students themselves, but also on teachers, parents, administrators, and policy-makers.

Why aren't students motivated? This is a great question. Perhaps a better one is: how can we make their learning contexts more motivating?

For more on the situative perspective, see Susan Nolen's recent writings:

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cedpsych.2020.101866

Advice for pursuing graduate school

12/9/2020

A student asked me for some advice for pursuing a scholarly career at a college or university, which is a goal of hers. I rattled off a little list that I thought might be useful to others, so I'm sharing it here (YMMV):

My main piece of advice for someone who's considering a scholarly career would be to get as much research experience as possible. Preferably this research experience will be directly in your area of interest, but any research experience is better than none, and research experience using similar methods OR theoretical approaches can be almost as valuable as experiences that are directly in your area of interest.
Identifying who you want to work with is a very important step in the PhD application process. Your fit with them, their research, their supervision style, etc. will be massively important. Finding out as much about them as possible, including reaching out to their current or former students, can help you narrow down your search and tailor your application materials to really highlight your fit.
Writing skills are also really important, so any and all work you can do to get help, get training, and polish your writing is very good.
One thing to clarify for yourself is to figure out if teaching is your main interest, if research is your main interest, or a combination of teaching and research. Scholarly careers come in many shapes and sizes. It may be that you don't know yet, but talking to people and gradually figuring out what you prefer and what kinds of experiences and skills are needed for the type of job you want will help you seek out the right training opportunities and experiences.
If you can, apply all over (rather than only in your current location), prioritizing (1) good supervisors who will open doors for you with funding, resources, mentorship, networks, etc., and (2) good programs that similarly support students well, and whose graduates are able to pursue careers you're interested in. Your chances of matching your needs and goals with the right experience will drastically improve if you widen your search.
One more: there is a LOT of good advice online, but this stuff can be very field-specific, so one idea could be to look on Twitter for some scholars and grad students in your area of interest. This will start to acclimatize you to the culture you're aiming to be a part of.

Good luck! It may be encouraging to know that I applied to PhD programs after nine years of being a stay-at-home mom, and got into only one of the 7 or 8 PhD programs I applied to! It turned out really well for me, and I hope it turns out similarly well for you!

Q&A: What is motivation? or, the first step to getting out of a rut

11/3/2019

"I'm so unmotivated!"

We've all been there: the to do list is staring you in the face but you just keep [checking social media/browsing YouTube/doing literally anything else] rather than getting started on these very important, maybe even urgent tasks. Just last week a student came to me in tears about her lack of motivation. She is nearing graduation and finding it increasingly difficult to muster the energy she needs to do even the simplest coursework tasks.

There are lots of reasons why this can happen, of course. If you're thinking it's a lack of motivation that's keeping you from your goals, consider the following: when you say you're unmotivated, what exactly do you mean?

In the literature, motivation is not just one thing that we have a little or a lot of. Instead, it's multifaceted. These facets reflect the different reasons we do things, and that's a good working definition of motivation in general: reasons for engaging in goal-directed behavior (Schunk, Meece, & Pintrich, 2014). So when I have a lot of motivation for writing today, that means I have compelling, energizing reasons that get me going on that writing.

Different theories of motivation focus on different facets. One I like, expectancy-value theory (Eccles et al., 1983), focuses on two broad categories of motivation that are essential for reaching our goals: expectancy for success and value for the task. To be motivated, I need to have good answers to two questions:

"Can I do this?" and "Why do I want to do this?" (Linnenbrink-Garcia, Patall, & Pekrun, 2016).

In my own research, I find that even small shifts in these motivations can have important consequences for grades, major choices, and even career outcomes.

So next time you feel unmotivated, a first step toward getting motivated might be to ask yourself which you're lacking: feelings of competence and the support you need to succeed, reasons to feel like the task is valuable, or both?

Eccles, J. S., Adler, T. F., Futterman, R., Goff, S. B., Kaczala, C. M., Meece, J., & Midgley, C. (1983). Expectancies, values, and academic behavior. In J. T. Spence (Ed.), Achievement and achievement motivation (pp. 75–146). San Francisco, CA: Freeman.

Linnenbrink-Garcia, L., Patall, E. A., & Pekrun, R. (2016). Adaptive motivation and emotion in education: Research and principles for instructional design. Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3, 228-236. doi:10.1177/2372732216644450

Robinson, K. A., Lee, Y. K., Bovee, E. A., Perez, T., Walton, S. P., Briedis, D., & Linnenbrink-Garcia, L. (2019). Motivation in transition: Development and roles of expectancy, task values, and costs in early college engineering. Journal of Educational Psychology, 111(6), 1081.

Robinson, K. A., Perez, T., Nuttall, A. K., Roseth, C. J., & Linnenbrink-Garcia, L. (2018). From science student to scientist: Predictors and outcomes of heterogeneous science identity trajectories in college. Developmental psychology, 54(10), 1977.

Schunk, D. H., Meece, J. L., & Pintrich, P. R. (2014). Motivation in education: Theory, research, and applications (4th ed., Ch. 1). Boston, MA: Pearson.