Thinking Positively: Using the Expectancy-Value Model of Achievement Motivation to Teach College Composition

Have you ever heard the story about the semi-truck that got stuck trying to go under an overpass? The police, the truck driver, and some structural engineers are all talking about the heavy machinery and long time that it will take to cut away the section of the bridge to be able to remove the truck. A little boy who has been sitting in traffic with his family for hours approaches and asks the group why they don’t just let the air out of the truck’s tires. You get the point: often, when we are confronted with large and complex problems, we assume that solutions also need to be large and complex. For English instructors, our problems in getting students engaged with academics and English classes may not be the kind that involve structural engineers, but they are complicated nonetheless.

The solution to the problem of student engagement may not seem apparent to us, not because it is too large to embrace but because we need a different paradigm from which to assess it. We often look at the lack of student engagement through an academic lens because we are academics, much as those engineers looked at their problem through an engineering lens. The problem with our lens is that is relies on the observable behavior of our students. When we see students attending class, leaning in, and sharing their thoughts, we conclude that they are engaged. Likewise, when we do not see these behaviors, we assume that they are not engaged.

But issues of engagement are closely linked with issues of motivation, and those are not often observable. The way in which an individual student perceives the skills and the content in our classes is actually about as observable as the air inside that stuck truck’s tires. We may not be able to see it, but we know it is there and we know it is important.

The alternate lens that I propose for the sake of reevaluating student engagement comes from the field of Educational Psychology. Allan Wigfield and Jacquelynne Eccles are two prominent practitioners and have developed what is called an expectancy-value model of achievement motivation. They explain that their model is designed to expose the triadic relationship among three factors: (1) an individual’s expectation for success; (2) an individual’s value for the tasks; and (3) an individual’s achievement choices such as persistence, effort, and performance. This reframing of academic motivation from an educational psychologist’s perspective helps educators to analyze the various influences that affect the achievement choices of students, ranging from gender roles to affective memories to incentives. These influences are best understood through Wigfield and Eccles’s flowchart in Figure 1.

Fig. 1.

Wigfield and Eccles’s expectancy-value model (69).

Wigfield and Eccles designed this flowchart to demonstrate the comprehensive scope of the research behind their model; as such, it appears to be cumbersome because of the number of factors that influence achievement-related choices. When we focus on the vertical columns, we can begin to understand the various factors as pieces of each level. Beginning on the left, we find broad factors that can often function on the subconscious level: cultural and gender influences, socialization factors, and “different aptitudes” (69). The second column involves more individual factors, and almost all are subconscious—perceptions and interpretations of various experiences. The third column starts to touch on conscious factors such as short and long-term goals, “perceptions of task demands,” and memories (69). On the far right, we can see the observable achievement-related choices that are directly influenced by an individual’s perceived “expectation of success” and usefulness for the task. While this type of data might seem overwhelming in its entirety because many factors are clearly not within the instructor’s control, a focus on the three most direct influences on achievement-related choices simplifies matters greatly.

The first of these factors is the belief of students in their abilities. Wigfield and Eccles’s...