My Tutor Hour

Insights on teaching, learning and the science behind them

Abstract illustration of student motivation: a plant thriving in window light beside an identical plant drooping in the shade

Is Motivation in the Student, or in the Room?

“He’s just not motivated”

If I had a pound for every time I’ve heard that, I’d have retired somewhere warm by now. I’ve said it myself, usually on a wet Wednesday, about a student who’d spent the lesson scribbling in the margins instead of knuckling down and doing the work, as if motivation were something he’d simply left at home.

It seems like a natural thing to say. Student motivation sounds like it should be something a student either has or hasn’t got, like a full tank of petrol or a flat battery. So the fix sounds natural too: change the student. Boost their mindset, set them goals, give them a pep talk, or tell them off.

A new essay in Educational Psychology Review asks us to look elsewhere first. Its authors argue that motivation isn’t only something inside a learner. It also emerges from what they’re doing, who they’re doing it with, and whether they feel they genuinely belong there. In other words, before we try to fix the student, it’s worth checking the room.

The essay on student motivation

“Further Redefining Motivation with Situated Cognition, Power, and Belonging” is by Daniel T. Hickey of Indiana University and Charmian Lam of the University of Chicago, and was published on 9 October 2026. It’s open access, so anyone can read it for free.

Hickey is a learning scientist at Indiana University who has spent more than two decades on what researchers call design-based research: building real courses and learning environments, studying what happens in them, and refining both the design and the theory as they go. A lot of that work has been in online courses, and it draws heavily on a famous 1989 paper, “Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning” by John Seely Brown, Allan Collins and Paul Duguid.

It’s worth being clear about what kind of paper this is. It isn’t a single experiment with a neat result. It’s a scholarly essay that pulls together theory, research and practice, and makes an argument. The authors draw on two of their own research programmes, one on online teaching and assessment and another on university writing seminars, to show what their ideas look like in practice. At the heart of this essay are two frameworks from the late learning scientist Randi Engle, known as productive disciplinary engagement and expansive framing, and the authors are particularly interested in how they can build a lasting sense of belonging for students from minoritised groups.

It’s a demanding read, the best part of half an hour if you’re reading it carefully. But if you’ve ever wondered why the same student can be both a live wire in one lesson and a lamp post in the next, it’s worth that little bit of effort I believe.

Three big ideas

1. Motivation may depend in part on the situation

Picture two students who seem equally able. Given the same challenging task, one dives in and the other quietly switches off. The easy explanation is personality: one’s keen, the other isn’t.

The essay asks us to look closer. Perhaps the first student has what they believe to be a real role in the task, they can see what it’s for, and can feel that their ideas will be taken seriously. The second though, might feel like a passenger, there just to receive instruction and hand in a worksheet at the end of it. The authors want us to check for those differences.

They frame this around three conditions that help motivation emerge:

  • Agency: do learners have real chances to make decisions and contribute their own ideas?

  • Belonging: do they feel recognised as legitimate members of the learning community, rather than visitors?

  • Meaning: can they connect what they’re learning to their own experiences, interests and plans?

2. Autonomy is more than a choice

We often equate autonomy with choice: let students pick their topic, their book, their order of questions. That helps, but the essay argues it isn’t enough. Learners also need chances to make contributions that actually matter, and to be accountable to other people for them.

There’s a real difference between “choose any of these three worksheets” and “your explanation of this method is going into the revision guide the whole group will use”. The first offers freedom. The second offers freedom and consequence, and that’s where ownership tends to start. This draws on Engle’s four principles for productive engagement: let students tackle problems that matter from their own point of view, give them real authority to address them, hold them accountable to each other and to the standards of the subject, and give them the resources to do all three. As one paper the essay cites puts it, too much authority with too little accountability leads students away from the subject rather than into it.

3. Learning is partly about becoming

This is the idea from situated cognition. Thinking and learning aren’t just things that happen inside a head; they’re bound up with the activities, tools, people and settings where they happen. Learning maths, from this point of view, isn’t only collecting facts and methods. It’s gradually becoming someone who can take part in mathematical conversations, the way a newcomer to any craft slowly becomes a member of it.

If that’s right, motivation and identity are tangled together. A student who doesn’t see themselves as “a science person” isn’t simply short of willpower. They may not yet feel there’s a place for them in the activity at all.

Where this fits

None of these ideas appears from nowhere, and the essay doesn’t claim they do.

The best-known motivation theory in schools is probably self-determination theory, developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan. It says we’re most motivated when three needs are met: autonomy, competence and relatedness. You can see the family resemblance straight away. Agency sounds a lot like autonomy, and belonging sounds a lot like relatedness. The difference is mostly one of emphasis. Self-determination theory tends to talk about needs inside the individual. Hickey and Lam put more weight on the activity and community around them, and on who has the power to shape them.

The idea of learning as becoming a participant owes a great deal to Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger’s work on apprenticeship. They described how newcomers start at the edge of a community, doing small but real tasks, and gradually move towards the centre.

Belonging has its own strong research tradition too. Perhaps the best-known example is a study by Gregory Walton and Geoffrey Cohen, in which a short exercise reassuring new university students that worries about fitting in are common, and usually pass, improved later grades for students from groups that often feel out of place. Small signals about who belongs can carry a long way.

Regular readers may also notice an echo of two recent posts here. In Before You Hand Over the Planner, a study found that a drop in students’ satisfaction with their course tended to come before procrastination, not after it. And in On, Off, Idle, engagement turned out to flicker from moment to moment depending on what was going on around a student. Both point in the same direction as this essay: what looks like a trait is often a response.

What it might look like on a Tuesday afternoon

The essay is about theory, but it raises very practical questions for anyone teaching a class or tutoring one student at a kitchen table. A few things I’d try, based on its ideas:

  • Give work a real audience. Ask a student to write a worked example for a younger sibling, record a short explanation for next year’s group, or make the revision card everyone else will use. Work that someone else depends on feels different from work that only the teacher sees.

  • Offer choices with consequences. Rather than “which of these three questions?”, try “which method do you think is quickest here, and can you convince me?” The choice now has a reason, and the student has to stand behind it.

  • Find the thread to their world. A teenager who couldn’t care less about percentages may care a great deal about whether a phone contract or a games subscription is a good deal. That isn’t a gimmick if it genuinely connects the idea to something they’re trying to work out.

  • Treat them as a member, not a visitor. Use the language of the subject with them, ask for their opinion on how a problem should be approached, and take their ideas seriously even when they’re wrong. Being treated as a mathematician, a historian or a writer is often how students start to become one.

  • Notice the change before blaming the child. When a student who used to be engaged starts to drift, ask what’s changed in the situation: a new topic, a new group, a bad mark, a sense that their ideas no longer count.

One study the essay draws on is especially relevant to tutors. In a 2011 tutoring experiment, Engle and colleagues taught students about the heart and circulation, then tested whether they could apply what they’d learned to the lungs. Students carried their learning over far better when tutors treated them as authors of their own explanations, rather than as spokespeople for the textbook. None of this means dropping structure or standards. The essay is clear that agency works best alongside guidance and accountability, not instead of them. The aim is ownership within a well-built activity, not a free-for-all.

So where is motivation?

Here’s a question I keep turning over. Where, exactly, is a conversation? It isn’t in either person. It’s in the space between them, in the back and forth. Take one person away and the conversation doesn’t shrink, it simply stops.

The essay invites us to think about motivation a little like that. Some of it is undoubtedly in the student: their history, their hopes, how much sleep they got. But some of it lives in the space between the student, the task, the people around them and the sense of what’s possible there. Change that space and the motivation changes too.

I find that both freeing and slightly uncomfortable. Freeing, because it means the “unmotivated” label isn’t a life sentence. The same student might be a different learner in a different set-up. Uncomfortable, because if motivation lives partly in the room, then I’m part of the room. When a student switches off in one of my sessions, the honest question isn’t only “what’s wrong with them?” but also “what have I built here, and who does it make room for?”

That doesn’t let students off the hook. Effort still matters, and some days a student just needs to get on with it. But it changes where I start looking. Before I reach for the pep talk, I try to ask whether the task gives them anything real to do, anyone to do it for, or any reason to believe they belong there.

A note of caution

This is a theoretical essay and research synthesis, not a single experiment, and its central claim is a position to weigh up rather than settled science. Many researchers would put more weight than Hickey and Lam do on stable individual differences, such as a student’s interests, anxieties or prior attainment. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle: motivation is shaped both by who a student is and by where they are.

It’s also a demanding read. Some of the language will be unfamiliar unless you’ve spent time with sociocultural theory, so it’s best tackled with a cup of tea and a little patience.

But I think it asks exactly the right question for anyone who teaches. The next time a learner seems to have lost their spark, it’s worth pausing before reaching for a new mindset poster. Should we try to change the learner, or redesign the conditions in which they’re learning? Quite often, I suspect, the answer is a bit of both, and the second one is the half we have more control over.

Sources

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *