Dissertation

Toward More Motivating Classrooms: A Study of the Relationship Between Autonomy- Supportive Course Design Features and Autonomous Learner Motivation

Plummer, Benjamin D

2018

Overview

This dissertation is an exploratory study of the impact on motivation of using autonomy-supportive course design features across a broad range of social science courses at the University of Michigan. The primary goal of this dissertation is to explore how variation in the employment of autonomy-supportive course design features affects the degree to which students internalize their motivation to do well in that course. Broadly, autonomy-supportive course design features are ways that instructors can design a course to give students more ownership over their learning, reduce the cost of failure, provide constructive feedback, and in general allow students’ perspectives to guide the way they interact with the course. The results from this study will ideally inform the way that autonomy-supportive course design is used in gameful courses, but will also be useful for course design in general. By studying autonomy-supportive course design outside of gameful courses I attempt to isolate the effects of autonomy-supportive course design from other features of gameful courses as well as student reactions to the novelty of gameful grading systems. In addition, I consider individual differences as potential moderators of the relationship between autonomy-supportive course design and student autonomous motivation. While there were no main effects of autonomy-supportive course design features on student autonomous motivation, there are significant interactions suggesting that different students react differently to certain autonomy-supportive course design features. Students may not perceive choice in the same way and these perceptions are influenced by student individual differences. Results indicate that higher achieving students were more adept at managing the additional responsibility of choice and thus approached the use of autonomy-supportive course design from a more autonomous perspective than lower achieving students. Students who perceived a low cost of engaging with a course, relative to students who perceived a high cost, tended to also approach autonomy-supportive course design from a more autonomous perspective since they had more time to manage that increased responsibility. One implication of these results for courses that utilize autonomy-supportive course design, including gameful courses, is that instructors should consider providing additional scaffolding to help students adapt to the novel course design elements. The goal of gameful pedagogy is to use the design elements of video games (not the games themselves) to re-design the grading system in a course in order to boost intrinsic motivation. Autonomy-supportive course design is one facet of gameful pedagogy alongside safe failure, and holistic backwards design (Holman, 2018). Self-Determination Theory researchers have found that well-designed video games are intrinsically motivating for players because they satisfy players’ needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness (Ryan, Rigby, and Przybylski, 2006; Przybylski, Rigby, & Ryan, 2010; Przybylski, Weinstein, Ryan, & Rigby, 2009). The intrinsically motivating nature of well-designed video games is the driver behind the study of the use of game design elements in other contexts, such as education. Limitations of the current study and potential future directions for research are discussed in the final chapter. This exploratory study of autonomy-supportive course design reveals much about the way that different students perceived autonomy-supportive course design features and raises important implications for the use of autonomy-supportive course design in gameful courses.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: Educational psychology / Pedagogy / Social studies education
• ISBN: 9781687929679, 168792967X