Post written by guest author Frederick Chew from the Fenner School of Environment and Society
Today, we will explore on how we can incorporate engagement in our lessons and learning activities. To help us get started, let’s look at a classic taxonomy of learning, the Gagne’s Nine Events of Learning.
Gagne’s Nine Events of Learning
Robert Gagne (1916-2002) developed a systematic way to approach the design of instruction and his model is based on knowledge of how human beings process information. Gagne’s ideas of instruction are what he calls “conditions of learning”:
- internal conditions deal with what the learner knows prior to the instruction,
- external conditions deal with the stimuli that are presented to the learner.
He suggested 9 events of instruction that may enhance student learning: gain attention, inform learners of objectives, stimulate recall of prior learning, present stimulus, provide learner guidance, elicit performance, provide feedback, assess performance, and enhance retention and transfer.
Read: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4017416/
You may ask: What have these 9 events got to do with engagement?
In Day 1, we touched on factors that affect student engagement. The 4 main factors of engagement are listed in the table below. Zepke and Leach (2008) developed a conceptual framework with two features; one identifying the four main strands emerging from engagement literature and the other identifying indicators that relate to these strands.
| Strands of engagement | Indicators |
| Motivation and agency
Engaged students are intrinsically motivated and want to exercise their agency |
A learner feels able to work autonomously
A learner feels they have a relationship with others A learner feels competent to achieve success |
| Transactional engagement
Learners and teachers engage with each other |
Students experience academic challenge
Learning is active and collaborative in and out of the classroom Students and teachers interact constructively Students have enriching educational experiences |
| Institutional support
Institutions provide an environment conducive to learning |
There is a strong focus on student success
There are high expectations of students There is investment in a variety of support services Diversity is valued Institutions continuously improve |
| Active citizenship
Students and institutions work together to enable challenges to social beliefs and practices |
Students are able to make legitimate knowledge claims
Students can engage effectively with others including the ‘other’ Students are able to live successfully in the world Students have a firm sense of themselves Learning is participatory, dialogic, active and critical |
Here we would like to focus on the first 2 factors: motivation and agency, and transactional engagement. Russell and Slater’s (2011) mentioned that learning environments need to provide the satisfaction of competence, autonomy, and relatedness so that intrinsic motivation can be encouraged. Likewise, relationship between students and teachers are important for student engagement. The indicators of these two factors can be solicited through Gagne’s Nine events with careful planning and design.
Putting these into practice, we can include indicators of engagement in activities that we design in the lesson. Gagne’s 9 events is always a good framework to guide us in systematic approach to lesson planning. For example, when planning an opening of a lesson, we can grab the attention of learners by starting with a pair or group discussion that they can relate to which is also relevant to the topic of the lesson. Doing this will motivate learners and allow them to have agency over the subject matter, helping students to draw relation between their personal experience and the topic.
| Gagne 9 Events | Planned Activities | Learners’ Activities | Strands of engagement |
| Gaining attention | Watch a short video related to the topic and proceed to do Think, pair and share | Starting with 2 minutes of self-thinking and then follow by sharing the person beside about the topic | Motivation and agency |
| Informing the learner of the objective | |||
| Stimulating recall of prerequisite learning | |||
| Presenting the stimulus material | |||
| Providing learning guidance | |||
| Eliciting the performance | |||
| Providing feedback | |||
| Assessing the performance | |||
| Enhancing retention and transfer |
ARCS Theory of Motivation
In Days 1 and 2, we also discussed how motivation influences student engagement. Saeed & Zyngier (2012) in their paper discussed about the importance for teachers to know how intrinsic and extrinsic motivations and engagement relate to students and their learning so that teachers are well-placed to provide a more supportive environment for student learning. The ARCS theory of motivation is a learning design model that we can look at when we want to design motivating and engaging learning. John Keller (2010) asserted that Attention, Relevance, Confidence, and Satisfaction are the major dimensions of learning motivation. The four motivational components relate to specific psychological foundations or theories prominent in the field of educational psychology, such as curiosity (attention), the expectancy value theory (confidence and relevance), and reinforcement with rewards (satisfaction).
Here is an article that will help you to understand how to integrate motivation plan into your lessons.
Discussion:
- When we design our lesson or learning activity how do we ensure the elements of motivation and engagement are present?
- From lessons you have designed in the past, were you able to incorporate component of attention, relevance, confidence and satisfaction?
References:
http://www.tamus.edu/academic/wp-content/uploads/sites/24/2017/07/ARCS-Handout-v1.0.pdf
Keller, J. M. (2010). Motivational design for learning and performance: The ARCS model approach. New York: Springer. https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9781441912497
8 thoughts on “Day 3: How can design for engagement?”
When I design a learning activity I rely mostly on extrinsic motivation. Each chunk of learning ends with assessment. I use the results of the assessment as a measure of engagement. Obviously I point out how what the student does will be good for the world, and their career, but those matter little to a student slugging their way through years of study.
I try to gain the attention of the class by pointing out in my welcome message which assessment task the lesson supports (and I have the message both as text and video). To make it relevant I point out how the knowledge and skills to be gained will be useful in their future career. To help with confidence I give them some small easy tasks to start. Satisfaction comes with feedback on their success on each task. This can be subtle, for example setting the Learning Management System to display a tick each time the student completes a step, or more explicit with the standard boilerplate feedback messages I provide for the tutors to use.
Hi Tom, good to see that you have been practicing ARCS in your teaching. This actually demonstrates to us how easy that motivation can be easily implemented in our lesson design and with models like ARCS or Gagne’s they can help as a checklist to remind us to put those motivative elements in our lesson plans.
Hi Frederick and all
I enjoyed reading about these frameworks/models. ARCS is nice because it feels intuitively aligned with strategies that can be effective across levels (age groups) of education.
– I have a tendency to spend quite a bit of time on the ‘attention’ end of things in my weekly preparation.
– I think ‘familiarity’ through reviewing previously-encountered concepts is very important when setting students up for new content. I know students like this and it’s something I don’t do quite enough of. I’d love to have a series of review quizzes set up, but these things are time-consuming to create. Having said that, even listing concepts for students to recall at the beginning of class is appreciated by them.
– ‘Motive matching’ in my teaching tends to be either drawing attention to connections between the class content with assessment tasks or drawing attention to how the content will be helpful in their lives (or both). Generally the former is more effective than the latter, but occasionally students contact me and tell me something has been relevant in their lives!
Susy
Hi Susy, able to draw on prior knowledge when learning new content is important. It provides learners confidence in the sense that they actually know something about the new content and can create comfort in learning. Also this idea of interaction of prior knowledge and new is the basis of constructivism.
“Motive matching” is always good for learners. It gives a purpose for learning.
How do we ensure the elements of motivation and engagement are present?
In maths tutorials, we get the students to work on set problems in small groups of 3-5 students, thus allowing relationships with other students. They experience challenge and active learning because we encourage them to explore the problems rather than just seek a recipe for the answer. I try to address each student individually – a challenge in online tutorials.
Were you able to incorporate component of attention, relevance, confidence and satisfaction?
Attention: The tutorial problems are not routine, and thus can generate curiosity. However, they might also generate fear in the less confident students. I try to reduce fear by encouraging them to play with ideas.
Relevance: I try to point out how I or others use the course material in various applications outside the uni.
Confidence: I praise students when they explore ideas, even if their ideas don’t help solve the problem at hand.
Satisfaction: Humour helps! (But not at anyone’s expense, except my own.) Positive feedback to students who give things a go.
Hi Agnes, it is great to see that you are able to run lessons that engage students in a subject that normally many feel not really possible. How I wish my lecturers did that when I was doing my engineering degree back in those days.
Attention: As Susy, I spend a lot of time to make my teaching interesting, and stimulating. It can be a lot of fun for me to come up with new ideas, as I myself can get bored easily if I were to repeat sessions without changes over time. However, admittedly it is a lot of effort and time commitment. I always include problem solving in my teaching, as that helps the students to test their understanding, and ability to apply their knowledge, while it also allows me to identify any misconceptions.
Relevance: In a professional course, such as medicine, case studies, and clinical problems can demonstrate the relevance of the material. Of course, no matter whether I teach undergraduate or medical students, they are primarily interested in how the content is relevant to assessments. My assessment items are mainly problem solving and case studies, to try to link the relevance for assessment and relevance for the future professional life.
Confidence: I always provide sessional learning outcomes, for all my teaching, lectures, practical classes and even for online exercises. Students are also provided with the marking rubric for all assessment items and regular formative assessments are available for the students. In first year of medical school, students come with varied prior knowledge depending on their previous degrees. To cater for these differences, I have different expectations from novices, versus those with prior experience. I make clear to students from the first week on and repeat it both verbally and in writing in the practical notes, what my expectation is from each group, and the assessment is designed so that demonstration of knowledge at novice level would result in satisfactory grade, but gives an opportunity to the more advanced students to demonstrate their ability to synthetise content on a higher level.
Satisfaction: I always try to include some aspects of gamification into my teaching. We have fun competitions where the winners (usually a group, rather than individual students) receive a certificate and chocolate. I like to run ‘student choice awards’, as these requires students to reflect on their own performance and also to learn from each other (students need to add reasons with their votes). Of course, winners receive a certificates and small awards. It is great to see the excitement that brings to the sessions.
The ARCS theory of motivation really resonated with me and my teaching practise. I teach in history. I often use historical footage or multimedia to catch student’s attention at the beginning of a lecture/topic. Another strategy I have used under attention is to relate the historical topic to contemporary events or debates in order to highlight its ongoing relevance. I have also found that explicitly outlining the learning objectives for each unit and how they tie into the assessment is useful in motivating students.