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Do *Goals* Motivate Students? How about *Feedback*?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
March-30-2025

Do *Goals* Motivate Students? How about *Feedback*?

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Motivation has been a HOT TOPIC this year in all the schools I’ve visited. Everywhere I go, I get questions about students’ apathy and indifference, and teachers’ frustration.

So, what can schools and teachers do?

Well, Self-Determination Theory offers a framework to answer that pressing question.

In this post, I’m going to introduce the theory — with a focus on its key concepts.

And then I’ll describe a study which helpfully reveals the complexity of enacting the theory wisely.

And, yes, as this post’s title suggests, that helpful study focuses on goals and feedback as motivational strategies.

Let’s see what researchers have discovered about the motivational benefits of goals and feedback.

Introducing Self-Determination Theory

Like many theories, self-determination theory (SDT) can be easily caricatured. Here’s the caricature:

  • Extrinsic motivation BAD!
  • Intrinsic motivation GOOD!!

These six words fall short in lots of ways, starting with this startling observation. SDT doesn’t contrast intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.

Instead, it defines six (yes, SIX) different motivational states — including four (yes, FOUR) different kinds of extrinsic motivation.

Here’s the kicker:

  • Unsurprisingly, intrinsic motivation is GOOD for learning.
  • Surprisingly, two flavors of extrinsic motivation are ALSO good for learning. (The other two flavors: not so much.)

The scholars who created the theory — Deci and Ryan — have a name for “good flavors of extrinsic motivation”; they call them “autonomous extrinsic motivation.”

At the top of this blog post, I asked: what can teachers do about apathetic students? Deci and Ryan answer: “foster the good kinds of motivation.”

Let’s Get Fostering!

Okay, if “the good kinds of motivation” can help, how do we teachers conjure them?

If I’m understanding SDT correctly, it includes bad news and good news.

  • Bad news: we really can’t create intrinsic motivation (as Deci and Ryan define it).
  • Good news: we really CAN create autonomous extrinsic motivation, which — as you recall — benefits learning.

We foster this good extrinsic motivation by focusing on three internal experiences: autonomy, relatedness, and competence.

That is: the more that my students feel in control (“autonomous”), close to one another (“related”), and effective at dealing with their environment (“competent”), the more autonous extrinsic motivation they will experience. And: the more they will learn.

The obvious implication of this theory, then: let’s focus on enhancing our students’ autonomy, relatedness, and competence.

Plausible Start

When I talk with teachers about this theory, they can easily start to brainstorm suggestions for creating autonomy, relatedness, and competence — and, presumably, the good kind of extrinsic motivation.

As a thought experiment, we can easily imagine that clear goals will have those results. And, while we’re at it, we might predict that process feedback will likewise.

Several middle school students eagerly raise their hands to answer questions

But let’s go beyond a thought experiment. Let’s have an experiment experiment — with students and data and calculations and all that good stuff.

What happens?

Happily, a research team in the Netherlands wanted to know. They ran a survey study with almost 600 students — aged 11 to 18 — in PE classes.

They asked two sets of questions.

First: did the teachers clarify the goals during class? That is, did they…

  • … tell the students what they were going to learn, or
  • … how they would be evaluated?

Likewise, did they offer process feedback? That is, did they …

  • … encourage reflection on how to improve, or
  • … discuss how to use the students’ strengths?

And so forth.

Second: they asked if the students experienced greater autonomy, relatedness, and/or competence.

To be thorough, they also asked if they experienced LESS autonomy, relatedness, and/or competence.

Once they crunched all the numbers, what did this research team find?

Not Surprising, or Surprising?

From one perspective, this study seems to be asking rather obvious questions. I mean: OF COURSE students will feel more autonomous if we tell them what the goals are, or more related if we give them feedback.

What other result would we expect?

Here’s the thing: in the world of research, we don’t just assume; we measure. And, sure enough, those measurements gave us the results we (probably) expected.

Yes: clear goals enhance autonomy, relatedness, and competence.

And yes: process feedback does too.

At the same time, the number crunching also provided surprising results.

In some cases, process feedback reduced two of those classroom experiences: “relatedness” and “competence.”

While this result might seem surprising at first, I think it’s easy to understand the chain of emotional events here.

If I give my students lots of feedback, they might feel like I’m hovering or pestering or interfering.

Of course, “hovering, pestering, and interfering” could quite easily reduce the quality of the teacher/student relationship. And, they might also reduce my students’ feelings of competence.

In other words: all that feedback could suggest the students are not doing very well. And that feeling of incompetence could — in turn — reduce the quality of their relationship with the teacher.

Solving the Conundrum

So, which is it? Should teachers give students process feedback because it enhances autonomy, relatedness, and competence? Or, should we limit process feedback, because it reduces relatedness and competence?

As is so often the case, I think we answer that question by rethinking the relationship between research and classroom practice.

Research can almost never tell teachers what to do. Instead, research is awesome at helping us think about what we do.

In this case, our thought process might sound something like this:

  • I want to create autonomous extrinsic motivation, so I should enhance my students’ sense of competence.
  • [Thinking]
  • I wonder if I can promote competence by giving them lots of feedback during today’s class.
  • [more thinking]
  • Now that I think about it, my feedback could enhance their sense of competence. But if I give too much feedback — or unwanted feedback — students could infer that I don’t have confidence in them.
  • [even more thinking]
  • So, I’ll put a note in my lesson plan to make time for feedback. But first, I need to think about the cues my students give me when the feedback is just too much…

Of course, those cues will look different depending on context.

  • 2nd graders will give different cues than 7th graders.
  • I suspect that — for cultural reasons — students in Japan signal frustration differently than those in New Zealand.
  • Students react differently to the cool, with-it teacher than they do with me. (It’s been a minute since I was the cool, with-it teacher.)

And so forth.

But if I consider self-determination theory as a THOUGHT PROCESS, not a TO-DO LIST, I’m much likelier to get the results I want.

In this case: my feedback is likelier to enhance than reduce competence. It’s therefore likelier to promote autonomous extrinsic motivation.

And my students are likelier to learn.

Krijgsman, C., Mainhard, T., van Tartwijk, J., Borghouts, L., Vansteenkiste, M., Aelterman, N., & Haerens, L. (2019). Where to go and how to get there: Goal clarification, process feedback and students’ need satisfaction and frustration from lesson to lesson. Learning and Instruction, 61, 1-11.

Goals, Failure, and Emotions: a Conceptual Framework
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson
February-16-2025

Goals, Failure, and Emotions: a Conceptual Framework

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Researchers can provide guidance to teachers by looking at specific teaching practices.

In last week’s post, for instance, I looked at a study about learning from mistakes. TL;DR: students learned more from review sessions where they explored their own mistakes than those where teachers reviewed ideas.

Or,

Back in December, I looked at a study about using “pre-questions” to reduce mind-wandering. Sure enough, students who answered pre-questions about a topic spent less time mind-wandering than those who didn’t.

Obviously, these studies might provide us with lots of useful guidance.

At the same time, this “one-study-at-a-time” approach has its drawbacks. For instance:

What if my students (or class) don’t really resemble the students (or class) in the study?

What if THIS study says that pre-questions reduce mind-wandering, but THAT study says they don’t?

What if THIS study (again) says that pre-questions reduce mind wandering, but THAT study says that mindful meditation reduces mind-wandering? Which strategy should I use?

And so forth.

Because of these complexities, we can — and should — rely on researchers in another way. In addition to all that research, they might also provide conceptual frameworks that help us think through a teaching situation.

These conceptual frameworks don’t necessarily say “do this.” Instead, they say “consider these factors as you decide what to do.”

Because such guidance is both less specific and more flexible, it might be either especially frustrating or especially useful.

Here’s a recent example…

Setting Goals, and Failing…

We spend a lot of time — I mean, a LOT of time — talking about the benefits of short-term failure. Whether the focus is “desirable difficulty” or “productive struggle” or “a culture of error,” we talk as if failure were the best idea since banning smoking on airplanes.

Of course, ask any student about “failure” and you’ll get a different answer. Heck: they might prefer smoking on airplanes.

After all: failure feels really unpleasent — neither desirable nor productive, nor cultured.

In a recent paper, scholars Ryan Carlson and Ayelet Fishbach explore the complexity of “learning from failure”: specifically, how failure interefers with students’ goals.

To create a conceptual framework around this question, Carlson and Fishbach create two concept pairs.

First: they consider the important distinction between goal setting and goal striving.

Happily, those terms mean just what they say.

When I decide that I want to learn Spanish, or strengthen my friendships, or stop drinking caffein, I am setting a goal.

When I decide to enroll in a Spanish class, schedule more frequent dinners with pals, or purge my kitchen of all my coffee clutter, now I’m goal striving.

This pair helps us think through the big category “goals” in smaller steps.

Second: Carlson and Fishbach consider that both emotional barriers and cognitive barriers can interfere with goal setting and goal striving.

The resulting conceptual possibilities look like this:

A 2x2 grid: with "goal setting" and "goal striving" as two columens, and "emotional barriers" and "cognitive barriers" as two rows.

The grid created by these conceptual pairs allows us to THINK differently about failure: both about the problems that students face, and the solutions that we might use to address them.

Troubling Examples

Having proposed this grid, Carlson and Fishbach explore research into its four quadrants. I’ll be honest, resulting research and insights frequently alarmed me.

For instance, let’s look at the top-left quadrant: “emotional barriers during goal setting.”

Imagine that one of my students contemplates an upcoming capstone project. She wants to set an ambitious goal, but fears that this ambitious target will lead to failure.

Her emotional response during  goal setting might prompt her to settle for an easier project instead.

In this case, her emotional response shuts down her thinking before it even started. As Carlson and Fishbach pithily summarize this situation: “people do not need to fail for failure to undermine learning.”

YIKES. (Suddenly, the whole “desirable difficulties” project sounds much less plausible…)

Or, top right (emotional barriers/goal striving): it turns out that “information avoidance” is a thing.

People often don’t want to learn results of medical tests — their emotions keep them from getting to work solving a potential health problem.

So, too, I can tell you from painful experience that students often don’t read the comments on their papers. When they’re disappointed with a grade, they don’t consistently react by considering the very feedback that would help them improve — that is, “strive to meet the goal of higher grades.”

Or, lower right (cognitive barriers/goal striving). Carlson and Fishbach describe a study — intriguingly called “The Mystery Box Game.”

Long-story short: in this game, learning how to fail is more beneficial than learning about one path to success. Yet about 1/3 of participants regularly choose the less beneficial path — presumably because “learning how to fail” feels too alarming.

Problems Beget Solutions?

So far, this blog post might feel rather glum: so much focus on failure!

Yet Carlson and Fishbach conclude their essay by contemplating solutions. Specifically, they use a version of that grid above to consider solutions to the cognitive and emotional barriers during goal setting and goal striving.

For example:

  • “Vicarious learning”: people learn more from negative feedback when it’s directed at someone else.
  • “Giving advice”: counter-intuitively, people who give advice benefit from it at least as much as those who receive it. So, students struggling with the phases above (say: cognitive barriers during goal striving) might be asked for advice on how to help another student in a similar situation. The advice they give will help them.
  • “Counter-factual thinking”: students who ask “what if” questions (“what if I had studied with a partner? what if I had done more practice problems”) bounce back from negative feedback more quickly and process it more productively.

Because I’ve only recently come across this article, I’m still pondering its helpfulness in  thinking about all these questions.

Given the optimism of “desirable difficulty/productive struggle” in our Learning and the Brain conversations, I think it offers a helpful balance to understand and manage these extra levels of realism.

Carlson, R. W., & Fishbach, A. (2024). Learning from failure. Motivation Science.

Get It Done by Ayelet Fishbach
Erik Jahner, PhD
Erik Jahner, PhD
January-23-2024

Get It Done by Ayelet Fishbach

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Screenshot 2024-01-23 at 12.24.30 PMOver the last few months, I have been working with a student who is retaking a class for a third time, not failing because the material was difficult for her but because she just could not get herself to progress. This is a pattern in college and life for her. She expresses a strong desire to succeed but struggles to muster the motivation needed to stay on track. Often, she begins a course or class projects with great intentions but finds her motivation waning over time. She even sets clear goals and then watches them sit on her desk. The recurring message she receives from others (and increasingly from herself) has been perhaps that she doesn’t want it badly enough, but when she self-reflects, this is a sentiment she vehemently disagrees with. She wants it with all her heart, and it brings her to tears but has been lost on how to move from “want” to “motivated.”

While engaging with her I began to read Get It Done: Surprising Lessons from the Science of Motivation by Ayelet Fishbach. And wow what a timely read! Unlike traditional productivity books, Fishbach delves into the science of motivation and offers insights on how to bridge the gap between wanting to do something and actually accomplishing it.

Engaging in discussions with my student about goal-setting and goal-sustaining advice from this book appears to have breathed new life into her journey. She has begun to see motivation as a skill that can be cultivated and is enthusiastic about doing so, especially within a social context of both our classroom interactions as well as working with her family. Importantly this enthusiasm is sustained. This experience has led me to view this book not only as a valuable self-help resource but also as a tool to assist others. Instead of dictating what individuals should do, it equips you with the scaffolding necessary to guide conversations with yourself and others that can support self-actualization.

The book’s first three parts primarily focus on three key ingredients for improving your drive to accomplish projects, not just mechanically getting lists of tasks done. Firstly, Fishbach provides guidance on articulating your goals effectively, ensuring that they serve as a driving force not just an artifact. Secondly, she addresses the challenge of maintaining motivation throughout the journey towards your goals. Lastly, she emphasizes the interconnectedness of our goals within the context of our busy lives and offers essential strategies to manage multiple goals.

She highlights the importance of recognizing that goal achievement is not solely an individual endeavor, but something influenced by our interactions with others. By harnessing these social connections, you can propel yourself forward and, in turn, help those around you. In the fourth section of the book Fishbach promotes the idea that goal-setting is a collaborative effort that can strengthen relationships. Through great stores and points of discussion, she equips readers with tools to become better mentors to their students or support systems for their families.

As a productivity book, this is also an easy read. While the insights are original and grounded in scientific research, these stories are informative, enjoyable, and brief. Any good productivity book should be a quick easy read from which you can extract useful tips and understand why you are about to embark on the suggestions offered, not a long drawn-out process that becomes another difficult goal to attain. While succeeding in this regard, this book is also hugely helpful to complement any other productivity methodology demonstrating that goals are not only things that need to get done but they add meaning to our lives, something often missed in other books.

In a world where people often feel disconnected, “Get It Done” serves as a valuable guide to socializing the practice of setting and achieving goals. It not only helps you enhance your self-control, patience, and mindset but also encourages a sense of community and shared purpose in pursuing meaningful goals.