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The Transform your Teaching podcast is a service of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Cedarville University in Cedarville, Ohio. Join Dr. Rob McDole and Dr. Jared Pyles as they seek to inspire higher education faculty to adopt innovative teaching and learning practices.
The point of education is not to do well on a test
Dr. Erika Patall:or get a good grade. It's just one tool in a broader goal of supporting people's development and growth and the ability to accomplish goals that they see as valuable.
Ryan:Hello, and welcome to this episode of Transform Your Teaching. In today's episode, Dr. Rob McDole and Dr. Jared Pyles chat with Dr. Erica Patall, who is currently professor of education and psychology at the University of Southern California.
Ryan:Today, they talk about self determination theory as part of our series on stirring motivation. Thanks for joining us.
Jared:Rob, we are continuing our series on motivation here on our podcast, and we are parking a bit on self determination theory.
Rob:Yes. And we have a wonderful guest with us today.
Jared:Yeah. Why don't you introduce our guest?
Rob:We have Dr. Erica Patall from University of Southern California. Again, self determination theory. We're back. And, let me just ask the first question here for our listeners, if you would. Could you explain self determination theory in plain language?
Dr. Erika Patall:Yeah. I will do my best. Alright. Alright. So well, first, self determination theory.
Dr. Erika Patall:It's a theory that's emerged out of psychology about the nature of human motivation. So even though it's come out of psychology, it's actually used in a lot of different contexts. It's used in education context, in health contexts, in workplaces for parenting, lots of other contexts. And that's because, it has a number of key ideas that are really apt you know, easy to apply in lots of different situations. And one of the key ideas from self determination theory is that everyone has psychological needs.
Dr. Erika Patall:These needs underlie people's motivation and how they function well, how they function adaptively. And those three needs that everyone has are autonomy. So everyone wants to feel like whatever they're doing, they endorse it, that it feels consistent with who they are and their values and their interests and their goals. The second one is confidence. So everyone wants to feel like they can master various skills and that they're effective with how they interact with the environment or how they interact with other people.
Dr. Erika Patall:And the third is relatedness. They wanna feel like they are you know, that they care about other people in their environment and that those people also mutually care for them. So why why are those things important? Well, because you can explain you know, you can understand a lot about what people do or, how they're thriving if you understand that they have these needs. And the environment sometimes supports those needs, and sometimes it doesn't.
Dr. Erika Patall:Sometimes the environment thwarts those needs. But the idea is that when those things are met, when people feel those that way, that their autonomy and confidence and relatedness are being met and supportive, that's the context in which they thrive. And when they feel like those needs are not being met, that's when you see people struggle essentially with their motivation and lots of other things, mental health.
Jared:So I come from the K-12 space. And one of the big things that, and you hit on this with autonomy, was student voice and choice. That was something that was a big, you know, give them the option. Like I was an English teacher, so, research papers, it was not, I'm not giving you the topic. You're going to have the choice of topic for this within certain boundaries or whatever.
Jared:But I never understood the psychology behind it. So, and you have been focusing on autonomy and choice. Tell us what drew you to that, and why is it such a motivating factor?
Dr. Erika Patall:Yeah. I do. I've done a lot of work on choosing as a motivation strategy and autonomy, supporting autonomy. And how did I get there? I've always been curious about the role of autonomy and agency and independence and people's success in school in particular, but also, you know, outside of school as well.
Dr. Erika Patall:When I started graduate school in social psychology, I was working with a mentor, Harris Cooper, who also really took a very practical approach to research, not just trying to, like, develop, you know, social psychological theories, but also to really trying to use his research to provide immediate practical recommendations to educators and parents and policymakers. And so, you know, I'm like a new graduate student. I'm trying to figure out what what would be a good thing to study, and I stumbled on the existing research on the effects of choosing. And I realized it was a topic that had, like, this like, both theoretical value to understanding, like, this sort of deep seated important role autonomy plays, but also really had a lot of practical significance as as you mentioned, like, in your, like, background as a k twelve in the k twelve space. Theoretical significance because choosing tends to be thought of as kind of the heart of experiences of autonomy, and practical significance because providing choices in the right way was a practice that educators and other people could likely easy you know, easily implement.
Dr. Erika Patall:Plus, there was a lot of controversy as maybe you encountered
Jared:Oh, yes.
Dr. Erika Patall:In the case case. Space about about choosing it was also controversy in the research. So that's what drew me to it.
Jared:Yeah. That's cool. Yeah. I I had the student to be like, oh, I get my choice. Well, I'm going to pick this, and I'd have to have a conversation be like, okay, that makes no sense.
Jared:Yeah. You're not gonna find any or it could be practical. You're not gonna find any research on that. Or that's so out of left field that that doesn't you're not gonna benefit from for doing this.
Rob:It's not in keeping with reality.
Jared:It's not in keeping with reality is a good way of putting Yeah.
Rob:Yeah. Erica, you mentioned something there, and I wanna just go back to it. You said giving them choice in the right way, I believe, is what you said. Giving them choices the right way or in the right way. Yeah.
Rob:Could you speak more to that idea? What do you mean by the right way? What is that right way?
Dr. Erika Patall:Yeah. So the the research on choosing is complicated. I mean, the like, what do we wanna start with? Like, giving choices is is a good thing. Like, overall, most of the time, there's gonna be benefits of people having chew having choices.
Dr. Erika Patall:Why? Because, you know, more often than not, it makes them feel autonomous, and this is one of the key ways it has benefits. It can also help with those other needs too, actually. Like, when you have an opportunity to choose, you have the opportunity to feel more confident because you can control the situation a little better. Mhmm.
Dr. Erika Patall:And you also may feel more related because the person is respecting you by giving you a choice. How you know, like, in the right way, how does it backfire? Well, choices can be overwhelming. Like, the decision making. People can become quite fatigued by decision making just in general.
Dr. Erika Patall:And so if you're asked to make a lot of choices or very difficult choices or you have options that aren't really appealing or you don't personally feel prepared to make a choice, you're like, you don't know how because you don't you're not really familiar. Maybe you're not familiar with the task Mhmm. Itself, and so you're not really sure how to make choices about it, it can backfire. You end up feeling, like, more overwhelmed by the decision making process and not particularly autonomous because you don't know what you're doing. Or the same thing can kinda happen when they're not that interested.
Dr. Erika Patall:Right? Like, you are truly not interested in this passing. So and now you're being asked to make decisions about it as well. So,
Jared:like Sounds like teaching.
Dr. Erika Patall:Some people prefer to give the decision over to another person, right, in some context for some tasks.
Jared:So in that case, the choice is not choosing.
Dr. Erika Patall:Yeah. The choice is not choosing.
Jared:Yeah. There you go. Interesting.
Rob:It's fun when you have everybody
Jared:I'll try that next time my wife says, where do you wanna go? Well, I'm choosing not to choose. You can take care of it now.
Dr. Erika Patall:And let's not forget. People like, you can get choices from somebody else that feel pretty controlling and not autonomous at all. Like, we do this with our kids. Right? Like, you have the choice of eating, finishing your dinner, or going to bed early.
Dr. Erika Patall:Which one you wanna do? Not very on top of this.
Jared:It's true.
Rob:Well, it's within a certain boundary, but, yeah, you can have one or the other. Yeah. So, you you know, you kinda honing in on that, and I I think you are right. Like, it's kinda complicated, and it's one of those things where I've always wondered. I have more more questions around it, and it seems like it depends becomes somewhat of the answer is what I think I'm hearing.
Dr. Erika Patall:Yeah. It does depend, but I still wanna come back to the first point I made, which is that having choices on average is is usually better than not. Sure. Alright? Like, none, never giving other people the opportunity to control what they do is really a big problem.
Dr. Erika Patall:A bigger problem than not quite having the right choices all the time.
Jared:It's more like, I'm thinking educationally wise. There's those other factors that go into it. It's not enough just to give the choice of I'm going back to English. The choice of research paper topic. You gotta show them the relevance of it.
Jared:You've gotta show them the and yet, like you said, you have to create an environment in which they feel like the choice they make is important or that they care about it in some way. It's more than just, well, I gave you the option. Why'd you what's wrong with you? Why can't you figure it out? Or why can't you come up with a topic?
Jared:Like you said, there are many controlling factors that can make the idea of choice beneficial instead of just being, oh, gave come on. Just pick something. How hard is it? You know?
Dr. Erika Patall:Yeah. Scaffolding sometimes scaffolding choices is really important or giving people opportunities to or students opportunities to connect with other people they trust to, like, make decisions with peers or parents or, you know, like or they make decisions in consultation, like, in collaboration with teachers. That can sometimes work better depending on, you know, what you know about your student. You kinda know that's a big thing in self determination theory. You really you kinda have to know you have to know people.
Dr. Erika Patall:You have to be able to take their perspectives to to give choices in a way that's gonna help them.
Jared:Service mindset.
Rob:Yeah. No. No doubt. We've talked about that so many times.
Jared:Mhmm.
Rob:Mine's just spinning because I'm also wondering you know, another question that I have is because the more you talk, the more questions pop up in my head. So I'll just apologize ahead of time.
Dr. Erika Patall:No. That's a good thing.
Rob:One of those would be, is there an average number of choices? When is it too much, like, terms of number of choices? Is there like, I give you three choices like the rule of three. We we use that in design a lot. The rule of three seems to be a pretty powerful rule of design.
Rob:So is that it? Do you give somebody three choices, or is two not enough and would seem controlling? Is four way too many? You get what I'm trying to say.
Dr. Erika Patall:Yeah. So when we talk about that self regulation issue with choices, like getting tired you know, getting fatigued from decision making, that that is a real thing. I think we've probably all experienced that. Right?
Ryan:Right.
Dr. Erika Patall:So there's both the issue of actually making decisions, discrete, like, choice, successive decisions you have to make that all have multiple options. Right? And then there's the other issue of how many options are you choosing among in any one one decision you're making. The research on it is kinda mixed with, like, how many options. There's some research that suggests that there's kind of a sweet spot around, you know, two to seven options, maybe a sweet spot for, like, that's what people feel like.
Dr. Erika Patall:They have efficient, you know, variety to choose among, but they're not too overwhelmed by trying to evaluate. But there's also some research that says suggest that's not really that important, how many options, and especially for people who are more expert. Right? They can handle they can handle more options. So the issue is still kind of dependent on who and what they know already.
Dr. Erika Patall:More expertise, you can handle a lot more options, and you probably can also handle a lot more decision making. But from a meta analysis that I did, actually, it was more consistent that the number of successive decisions, did see a kind of a, you know, the the effect started to go back down once people had made something like two to six decisions.
Rob:Wow. That's relatively small too, it seems to me. So you're
Dr. Erika Patall:It wasn't negative. Let me also clarify. The effect doesn't become negative. It just it kinda peaks and then flattens out.
Rob:Okay. So
Dr. Erika Patall:flattens. And it yeah.
Jared:So this series has brought to my attention a student that I had put in the back of my memory back when I was student teaching. And I brought it up in another episode that we did when we did intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. I had a student in my student teaching who I gave them a, multi genre project. It was like, have your choice of genres. Here's a list of 20.
Jared:Pick five, blah blah blah. And I had the student come up to me and go, I don't care. What do you want me to do? Just give me just just pick five for me. I don't wanna pick.
Jared:What do you want? Because that student the entire time was extrinsically motivated about the grade. That's all they cared about. They don't they don't want a choice. They wanna do what I want them to do.
Jared:And so they were like, just just do it for me.
Rob:No. They don't even wanna know what you're teaching. They just wanna get a good grade.
Jared:They just want the grade. So how does that intersect?
Dr. Erika Patall:What did you do there?
Jared:That yeah. Like, as a teacher, you don't go, well, this goes against everything that I've been learning as a as a pre service teacher. What do we do? What do you do?
Dr. Erika Patall:Yeah. I mean, so that might be a situation where choice isn't gonna be your best strategy. Right? So you have to if the student just is completely disinterested in every, like, every aspect of the topic, of the task, you've gotta find a way to connect it to something they are interested in. Right?
Dr. Erika Patall:And if the choices haven't done that, like, that's one way you try to use the choice. Like, well, maybe if they can control something, they can find the the the aspect that they're most interested in. And, like, that they that's how they get the connection, right, and feel about hunger. But if that's not happening, you haven't been able to do that with choices, it's time to, like, try something else. What are the other options?
Dr. Erika Patall:Well, maybe maybe you haven't considered like, talk to them about what they are interested in. Try to, like, make connections to the task to something, you know, they are interested in. That can sometimes be challenging. Maybe it's about the actual assignments, like, the the mode of the assignment. Like, is it a written assignment or, like, is there something you can change about the way they learn the material?
Dr. Erika Patall:Like, the way they demonstrate their learning that is more appealing if that's the issue and not the topic. A strategy that is sort of sneaky is, like, getting a student to reflect on why they why whatever they are learning is important. Right? So, like, they act the assignment becomes, okay. Before you do this actual this project or whatever that we're working on, I'd like you to write a paragraph or two paragraphs on why this is important to do.
Dr. Erika Patall:Like, in a top no. Really.
Jared:I love it.
Rob:I've done that. Guilty.
Dr. Erika Patall:Works. That one works.
Rob:Salt in the oats.
Dr. Erika Patall:How it could help you or how it could help the people you know if you were to learn this and you were to do this. And sometimes part of it is you give them examples of like, well, this is why I was thinking it's important. This is why I have you do it in the first place. Right? Now you think about it.
Dr. Erika Patall:And then they kinda convince themselves of the value. And then, you know, from there, they're more they may actually be more interested in making those choices and less interested in you telling them everything to do.
Jared:I feel like some instructors would be like, if they have to think about why this assignment's important, then I have to think about why this assignment's important. And if I don't have a good enough answer for that, maybe I shouldn't have them do it in the first place. Well Which is great. Mean, that's
Dr. Erika Patall:important for instructors to do. Actually, this is a question I always feel a little uncomfortable at saying it to instructors, but this is a really critical reflection instructors should be doing. If you don't know why it's important, why why would you expect your students to have any other orientation other than, like, just give me a good grade and tell me what I need to do to get a good grade? Because you all think it's important, and neither do I.
Jared:The extrinsic structures that exist, like we talked about grades, requirements, standards
Rob:Legislation.
Jared:Legislation. How does that fit in a world of autonomy supported teaching? Like, there are certain things that you just can't you have no control over yourself as an instructor. How do you Yeah. You shouldn't give your students any sense of autonomy in that aspect, though.
Dr. Erika Patall:Yeah. This is a tough one. Right? Because there's a lot of there's a lot of things outside of instructor's control. Right?
Dr. Erika Patall:Yeah. Self determination theory researchers, we tend to like to emphasize the dangers of, you know, putting too much pressure on things like grades and tests, and, you know, there's a reason for that. You know, our educational system places a lot of emphasis, maybe the most emphasis on grades and achievement test scores to evaluate. The problem is that it has a real potential to undermine those psychological needs that we've been talking about. As it, you know, like when you when you emphasize grades and tests and things like that, it really focuses people's reasons or students reasons for doing things not on those internal values and interests and goals, but on the extrinsic consequences that may not have much value beyond being gatekeepers.
Dr. Erika Patall:Right? So on the other side of that issue right. So that's why we're like, you should avoid emphasizing that as the reason because if you do emphasize, like, well, the reason to do this is, like, to get good grades and, you know, so that you have a good test score so that you can move on to the next thing. That's gonna be the reason students adopt for doing that and not really their internal values, which won't like those as soon as those things are done, people won't continue, like, working on whatever and growing in that area that you're trying to get them to develop skills in. On the other side of the issue, though, because I'm kind of a practical minded person, I don't see a world where grades and tests and standards are not part of the educational process.
Dr. Erika Patall:Why? Because for lots of reasons that are actually in line with self determination theory. Feedback is important to developing mastery, and a sense of competence, and grades and tests and clear standards are all part of the process of developing competence. But there's gotta be balance. The point of education is not to do well on a test or get a good grade.
Dr. Erika Patall:It's just one tool in a broader goal of supporting people's development and growth and ability to accomplish goals that they see as valuable.
Jared:Gotcha. I wonder though, you mentioned grades and emphasizing too much extra credit, specifically, practically extra credit. I I was curious from self determination theory, a a theorist like yourself, a researcher, thoughts on extra credit work in a class.
Rob:Dun dun dun.
Dr. Erika Patall:Oh my goodness. Yes. I hate this question.
Jared:Yes.
Rob:You have degraded her self determination quotient.
Dr. Erika Patall:I feel conflicted. I've got this question.
Jared:Let it all out. That's fine.
Dr. Erika Patall:I mean, okay. It's I I don't know if that it's any different, though. Extra credit. Right? Like, on the one hand, you wanna as the instructor, you wanna demonstrate that you see value in a student doing something.
Dr. Erika Patall:Right? That you're gonna like, you're you believe that there is importance in doing that activity, and therefore will give them a reward or give them the credit they deserve for developing the skill. So on the one hand, it can be very helpful to developing a sense of confidence, right? Because you're gonna give them feedback in the form of extra credit. On the other hand, it's the same kind of problem that you focus them on the reason for doing something is just to get the extra credit.
Dr. Erika Patall:So I don't know. It's
Rob:Sounds like a tough
Dr. Erika Patall:It's a tricky balance.
Rob:Yeah. It keeps coming back to that whole balance thing, and I you have to know the student, like, individually. But even then, you usually don't do extra credit just individually because then you'd be accused of Yeah. Not being fair. And just, well, why did why did Johnny get extra credit and Susie didn't or vice versa?
Dr. Erika Patall:I think if you combine extra credit with some of the other strategies that are meant to support students' autonomy and competence, that's maybe the way to go. Right? So if you're if there's choices about what can be done to earn extra credit with the extra credit being like, well, I wanna honor your effort to continue developing your skills, but how you do that and what specifically you focus in on to develop a skill that I wanna also support your autonomy to to follow your own goals. So if those things are combined, that might be the best way to kind of support needs and also use a strategy that's quite helpful for getting people to think about what are important skills to develop.
Rob:Well, last question, if I may. Please. So what is one small evidence based change educators or learning designers like ourselves could make to better support student motivation? You know, we have k through 12 listeners. We have higher ed listeners.
Rob:What would you wanna say to them?
Dr. Erika Patall:Okay. I think a key message I would want educators to internalize is that they actually you know, they're they don't need to do everything. Right? So I mentioned at some point in this interview, like, thinking about, you know, giving choices a course, thinking about how to take a task and bring in students' interest in it, having them reflect on the importance. They don't have to do everything all the time.
Dr. Erika Patall:Even small changes can make a difference whether or not it's providing choices or creating an assignment that taps into students' interests or whatever. What is critical, though, I would say, is that educators really need to always start their starting point should be taking the student's perspectives in whatever they design. So, like, go through the process as they design instruction, like, how will the students experience this content or assignment? How does it connect to what they already like or know or what I know of them? Mhmm.
Dr. Erika Patall:And that's that's kind of the key. That's that's the base of creating, instruction that will support autonomy in particular.
Jared:Know your students.
Rob:Yep. Sounds very familiar.
Jared:Yep. Erica, we really appreciate you taking your time out, to spend some time with us and help us with this, topic of self determination theory. Yeah. You've you've left us with many answers, but also lots of questions as well.
Rob:This has been, very insightful, and thank you for sharing so much with our with our, listeners.
Dr. Erika Patall:My pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Ryan:Thanks for listening to this episode of Transform Your Teaching. If you have any questions or comments about our conversation with doctor Patel, feel free to email us at ctlpodcast@cedarville.edu. You can also chat with us or connect with us on LinkedIn. And finally, don't forget to check out our blog at cedarville.edu/focusblog. Thanks for listening.