Motivation in Project-based Classrooms: New Measures Better Coupled to Students’ Experiences

Abstract

Project-Based Science (PBS) has traditionally been proposed as a comprehensive approach to classroom teaching and learning that is designed, in part, to better motivate students to learn. As PBS units became more widespread in schools, initial evaluations of their impact focused primarily on documenting important learning outcomes such as performance on unit assessments and standardized exams (Herman, Mackenzie, Sherin, & Reiser, 2002). The motivational impact of PBS units is not so well documented. In particular, little has been done to study motivation across PBS units or across school years. Traditional measures of motivation, first developed primarily by educational and developmental psychologists, were essentially inherited by the learning sciences community and have not been efficient indicators of the impact of curricular innovations on student motivation. We argue for new motivation-related measures that are more closely coupled to the actual experiences of students in projects and report on our initial attempts to develop such measures.