Motivating your Students
Practical examples from ETH Faculty
Motivation is considered to be one of the most important aspects of effective student learning and engagement. Though it can be a challenge to generate deep motivation from the outside, lecturers can create conditions that enhance the intrinsic motivation of students such as create engaging activities or authentic assessments. In this Refresh Teaching we will hear from lecturers who have used different techniques to enhance intrinsic student motivation in their courses. In their presentations they will share what they tried, why they tried it and how their students responded to their efforts. We look forward to welcoming you to a lively discussion on this inspiring and important topic!
Introducing an active learning sequence into a conventional lecture to enhance student motivation and learning
Maureen is a research associate and lecturer in the Department of Environmental Systems Science at ETH.
Active learning methods are recognized for their effectiveness in increasing student engagement, motivation and long-term retention of course material. As part of the “Foundation of Teaching and Learning” program, my project aimed to implement an active learning activity aligned with course objectives to replace a traditional lecture-based lecture section. The primary goals were to increase student motivation, facilitate deeper understanding and promote the transfer of knowledge to problem solving. The activity involved interpretation of data from a published study, followed by collaborative discussion and summary of the findings. The content learned was consolidated through a presentation of the key findings to the class. Student feedback indicated that the activity was appreciated by the students who were motivated to actively participate in the activity and found the activity useful in integrating the content previously studied.
From Soil Measurements to Soil Health - motivating the learning of measurement methods with the assessment of soil health status
Peter is a senior scientist and lecturer at ETH doing research on structures controlling soil physical processes from pore to catchment scale.
In the course “Environmental Measurements Lab” the students learn about methods to quantify processes in the ‘hidden’ subsurface. To show the challenges of measuring in such a complex environment, it is essential that the students conduct a series of field experiments. The planning of such field experiments that allows the inclusion of all students in the practical part is time consuming (binding a lot of resources). But despite the rich menu of methods and tasks we offered in the class since 2013, the objective of the application of the various tools did not become very clear to the students. Based on this experience, we rearranged the course contents to link all sampling campaigns, field measurements, and data analyses to the overarching objective of soil health assessment. We just finished the 2ndcourse with this new focus and I would like to share the experience we collected so far.
Fostering motivation in propedeutic physics lectures
Daniela is an assistant professor in the physics department doing research on Nanostructures and Ultrafast X-Ray Science.
The content of a propedeutic “Physics 101 lecture” is rather canonized. Typically it covers classical mechanics, sometimes combined with electromagnetism or some thermodynamics. Therefore, at first sight, this offers little opportunities to adapt towards optimizing students’ interest and engagement. In addition, many students, especially those from other departments but with physics in the main curriculum, are coming with some reluctant feelings towards Physics. They mainly think about physics as a difficult hurdle they have to master in order to pass the Basisjahr at ETH which severely hinders their motivation. A central challenge in designing and delivering a successful introductory physics course is therefore to find suitable ways of motivating and engaging students in order to facilitate and enhance their learning. I will present a few measures that I found work in my classical mechanics lecture for material scientists and will discuss them in the context of the basic principles of self-determination theory.