Motivating Students to Write: Some Empirical Answers (and Questions)

What motivates students to write in school settings? Why and what do students write outside school, if they do? What is the relationship between topic selection and motivation? Why do some students develop a deep interest in writing while others feel hopeless about their ability ever to succeed? How can we understand student motivation so that we can improve the design of our pedagogy?

Often, the logic of student motivation to write looks simple: "I write because my teacher told me I had to in order to get a good grade." This straightforward reasoning, however, obscures the complexity of student motivation. Students at all levels of ability and education have a history with writing, a way they have been conditioned by experience and environment to think about writing. However, relatively little scholarship on motivations for school writing has been attempted, perhaps because motivation is complicated and unwieldy, involving a complex of cognitive and psychological elements, including self-efficacy beliefs, personal investment, ability, interest, and environment. Motivation does not lend itself easily to empirical investigation, in part because each element must be studied in the context of all the others. Interest in studying student motivation, however, is emerging, as evidenced by Writing and Motivation, a 2007 collection of studies that takes seriously the notion that, with the right design and methodology, student motivation should and can be empirically researched with useful outcomes.

Writing and Motivation consists of fourteen article-length chapters authored by international research teams. The collection includes an impressive array of qualitative and quantitative methods and analytic schemes, including experimentation, ethnography, case study, portraiture, and mixed-methods research. The studies represent a range of educational contexts from kindergarten through college and include minority populations, such as learning-disabled and ESL students. The studies, almost as a whole, consider what are believed to be the basic elements of motivation, primarily the concept of self-efficacy.

The evolution of writers' self-efficacy beliefs is a major theme of Writing and Motivation. "Self-efficacy" refers to a person's perception of his or her own ability, in this case, the ability to write. If students don't believe they can handle the complexities of writing, their motivation to write in any context will be diminished. In 1975, John Daly and Michael Miller investigated the effects of low self-efficacy, chiefly apprehension about writing and subsequent writing avoidance. Based on previous research on oral communication, Daly and Miller suggested that students who showed strong levels of apprehension about writing would be less likely than their less anxious peers to perform well on writing tasks in school. They found that adults who were highly anxious about writing saw their occupations as requiring less writing than those who reported low levels of writing anxiety. This finding suggests that people who are anxious about their ability to write may deliberately choose careers they see as involving few writing tasks or that they minimize the role writing actually plays in their professional lives. Many studies in Writing and Motivation update and focus our understanding of self-efficacy by describing its role in particular populations and school situations.

A good example of a study involving self-efficacy occurs in the fourth chapter, "A Writer's Discipline: The Development of Self-Regulatory Skill." Barry Zimmerman and Anastasia Kitsantas review several studies on self-regulation and conclude that self-efficacy is in large part a function of whether students adopt effective self-regulatory behavior. Self-regulation refers to a writer's discipline to move through a complex and often frustrating recursive process of prewriting, writing, and revising. Although Zimmerman and Kitsantas begin by discussing the self-regulatory behavior of experts, they develop a theory of cyclical self-regulation that may be useful for teachers of students at all levels attempting to improve self-regulatory behavior without relying solely on the grade-as-reward structure. The authors advocate careful diagnosis of each student's problems with self-regulation and intervening to reteach strategies...