Skip to main content

Motivation in the Legal Research Classroom

Motivating students in the legal research classroom can be a challenge. As we know, there are many false narratives surrounding students' conceptions of legal research's importance, interest level, and ease, all of which can result in a decrease in students' motivation to engage in this subject matter.

There are two types of motivation--intrinsic and extrinsic. Extrinsic motivation occurs when students are motivated by an outside reward or punishment;[1] in instruction, this is often the grades students will get on research assignments or the participation points they might receive for actively engaging with in-class exercises.  Intrinsic motivation, on the other hand, occurs when students are interested in the topic for its own sake.[2]

Due to legal research's false narratives, students entering our classrooms tend to be drive primarily by extrinsic motivation.  The problem is, as Julie Dirksen aptly notes in her excellent book Design for How People Learn, "intrinsic motivation kicks extrinsic motivation's ass."[3]  Intrinsic motivation leads to greater and longer-term engagement and a greater depth of learning because the motivation doesn't go away when the reward or the punishment goes away.  Intrinsic motivation leads to a host of other benefits; those who are intrinsically motivated "tend to be more aware of a wide range of phenomena, while giving careful attention to complexities, inconsistencies, novel events, and unexpected possibilities."[4]  While extrinsic motivation can be useful for getting students in the room for class, how can we tap into the power of intrinsic motivation?

There are a number of different theories out there on how to support intrinsic motivation.  Most include three common factors that are laid out in self-determination theory (SDT) and its concept of cognitive valuation.[5] 

  1. Autonomy. Autonomy is the first element of SDT.  We can help increase students' intrinsic motivation by helping them feel some control and some freedom in their learning.  When conditions diminish students' perceived autonomy or competence, it undermines intrinsic motivation.[6]  I suspect this is why "treasure hunt" style exercises are so unpopular with students; in those exercises, they have little freedom to explore research platforms, to test out new methods, and to determine their actions. Instead, we should introduce strategies to students and then let them test them out themselves, hypothesizing what might work and adjusting their strategies if they fail. 
  2. Competence. Secondly, students need to feel challenged by their learning--it should be neither too difficult nor too easy.  When students have opportunities to gain new skills and to be challenged appropriately, their perception of their competence increases.[7]  This can be a difficult mark to hit when students arrive in our classroom with variant skill levels, but assignments that increase in difficulty is one way to ensure that all students are encountering a challenge in the assignment.  We can use scaffolding techniques with the early questions to help students with lower skill levels succeed with the earlier questions and work up to the more challenging questions.  But by having some harder questions toward the end, every student, regardless of their initial abilities, will be able to feel some struggle. By overcoming that struggle, students will start to have feelings of mastery, which is another important component of the competence prong of SDT.[8]
  3. Relatedness. Finally, students experience relatedness when they feel a connection to others.[9]  On legal research assignments, students are often working on their exercises solo.  Try finding ways to let your students work together to solve problems in pairs or groups, so they feel a connection to their classmates.  Maybe try setting up an advanced legal research class as a firm with a set of team goals that students can work toward as a unit.
Prizes and rewards in class are fun, but they do not have the power of intrinsic motivation in getting students to engage deeply in the material and consequently walk away with more knowledge.  By helping students increase their level of intrinsic motivation, not only will class be a better experience for all involved, but students will learn more.  Keeping these three prongs--autonomy, competence, and relatedness--in mind can help us to develop our courses in a way that utilizes the power of intrinsic motivation.





[1] Julie Dirksen, Design for How People Learn 30 (2016).

[2] Id.

 [3] Id.

 [4] Karl M. Kapp, The Gamification of Learning and Instruction: Game-Based Methods and Strategies for Training and Education (2012).

[5] Id.

 [6] Id.

 [7] Id.

 [8] Id.

 [9] Id.
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Why Experts Can Struggle to Teach Novices

This week in our Slack group on teaching , there was an interesting discussion about expertise and the amount of time needed to prep for instruction. I mentioned something that I recalled reading: that experts can be less effective in teaching novices because often the expert skips cognitive steps that the novice learner needs to understand.  I thought I'd dig into this a little more today on the blog. The fact is novices and experts learn very differently.  The major reason for this is that experts not only know a lot about their chosen discipline, but they understand how that discipline is organized. As such, what has a clear structure to the expert is a jumbled set of unorganized information to the novice.  The information presented to novices "are more or less random data points."[1]  In contrast, when the expert learns something new in her area of expertise, she just plugs it into the knowledge structure that already exists in her long-term memory. Because the...
Read more

Helping With Student Focus & Motivation in the Remote Classroom, Part 3: Limiting New Technologies to Reduce Extrinsic Cognitive Load

A librarian colleague used to say to me, "Technology is great until it's not." This couldn't be more true in the classroom.  As many of us prepare for a fall entirely or partially online, there's a rush to familiarize ourselves with lots of new educational technology to teach our classes. There's this sense that if you're not using the best and newest ed tech in your class, you're doing something wrong. Fortunately, the science doesn't back this up.  Using too many different types of technology can be a contributing factor to cognitive overload in students . Cognitive load is a term cognitive psychologists use to describe the mental challenge that the limitations of working memory puts on a student's learning.[1] Basically, working memory is extremely limited in both time and duration. Humans can only hold on to between four and nine "chunks" of information at any given time,[2] and can only hold on to new information in their worki...
Read more

Cognitive Disruptors in Legal Education

The pandemic has had a significant impact on all of our lives (biggest understatement ever).  However, with the return to in-person learning at many institutions, there has been this feeling that we should have returned to our "normal" teaching strategies in an effort to get back to the way things were. But of course, we know that things are not the same.  People traumatized by the pandemic--loved ones being gravely ill and dying, extreme isolation, financial stressors due to industries being impacted, and more--are experiencing lingering effects of the past two years.  Burnout has become the buzz word, as entire circles of friends and colleagues report feeling emotionally, physically, and mentally exhausted. This means that our classrooms should not go back to normal.  We must consider what might be impacting our students' ability to attend to and retain new information presented in our classrooms.  I've written before about cognitive (over)load and the limits...
Read more

Reflection in the Legal Research Classroom

Reflection is a critical component of experiential learning.  We see in ABA Standard 303 that experiential courses must include multiple opportunities for self-evaluation.  Self-evaluation is critically important to legal research.  Students must reflect on and assess their research methodology each time they research to continue becoming more efficient legal researchers and to determine what research strategies work best in which situations. [1] Reflection relates to several ideas found in cognitive theory that have been shown to result in stronger learning and retention: Retrieval : recalling recently-learned information;  Elaboration : finding a nexis between what you know and what you are learning; and  Generation : putting concepts into your own words and/or contemplating what you might do differently next time. I've been contemplating how to better incorporate reflection into legal research classes. At the beginning of this semester, at the recom...
Read more

The Experiential Simulation Course Checklist, Part 1

When developing courses to meet the requirements for experiential simulation courses, there are three ABA standards that come into play: Standard 303(a)(3), Standard 302, and Standard 304. When combined, there are eight bullet points that one must meet to comply with the standards for experiential simulation courses**: " Primarily experiential in nature " (Standard 303(a)(3)):  To meet this bullet point, an ABA Guidance Memo provides additional help. It notes that the "primarily" suggests "more than simply inserting an experiential component into an existing class." Furthermore, the "primarily" "indicates the main purpose of something." It is clear that the experiential nature of the course should be central to the course's design and should be prevalent across the entire length of the course. In fact, the ABA notes that the "experiential nature of the course should . . . be the organizing principle of the course, and th...
Read more