Motivational Load in Instructional Design

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Contact Information: Sean Early; Waite Phillips Hall, University of Southern California; Los Angeles, CA 90089-4038

Introduction

Recently, researchers and instructional design theorists have turned their attention to applying theoretical structures from Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) to what has been called motivational efficiency (Paas, Tuovinen, van Merriënboer, & Darabi, 2005). This is an important development in instructional design because multiple lines of research from the field of motivational effects on goal-oriented performance can be brought to bear on questions of motivational efficiency in instructional design. The call for an integrative approach to the role of motivation in training and instruction was made effectively by Colquitt, LePine and Noe (2000) in their exhaustive review of twenty years of literature on training outcomes. Motivational variables explain training outcomes over and above cognitive abilities (Colquitt, LePine and Noe, p. 702) and, due to their inherent responsiveness to manipulation (Pintrich and Schunk, 2002) provide a valuable point of focus for instructional designers who seek to improve learning. This claim is hardly controversial – there is wide agreement about the importance of motivation in learning (Salomon, 1984; Ford, 1992; Pintrich and Shunk, 2002). The difficulty has been in the ways in which motivation has been defined and measured, and achieving synthesis across findings. By focusing on self-efficacy, or goal orientations or emotions, or any one of a number of other meaningful sources of outcome variability, one may clearly see the trees, but fail to appreciate the forest in which they grow.

This paper, then, has three purposes. First, the paper will identify relevant constructs from the motivational literature that may usefully aid in the development of a theory of motivational load. Second, the paper explores how previously validated indexes of motivation, active choice, mental effort, and persistence, may inform dynamic measurement and support of motivation during learning. Last, the paper proposes a substantive dialogue focused on theory building and the development of research questions.

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