ACHIEVEMENT MOTIVATION IN THE GEOSCIENCES: BRINGING OUR JOY TO OUR STUDENTS

Imagine that you take your students to the Grand Canyon. As you stand at the rim, the vista evokes a variety of responses – awe, wonder, happiness – inspired by the aesthetic grandeur of nature. Your geoscientific understanding of strata, landscapes, and the geologic record exposed before you increases the meaning and depth of the experience.

The scenario painted above exemplifies the connections between the cognitive domain of knowledge and skills and the affective domain of emotions, attitudes, and motivation. To what extent do our students' aesthetic and emotional responses affect their motivation to learn and understand more about geoscience?

As an outcome of the February 2007 NAGT On the Cutting Edge workshop entitled, “Motivations and Attitudes: The Role of the Affective Domain in Geoscience Learning,” we are developing and organizing a model of how the affective domain intersects with cognition in the geosciences, with a focus on what features or characteristics of geoscience content make it unique among the sciences and other disciplines. Our preliminary model focuses on achievement motivation as viewed in an expectancy x value framework (Wigfield & Eccles, 2002). We have used three aspects of educational psychological research to understand motivation for learning in the geosciences: prosocial and experiential learning, autonomous and achievement motivation; and the aesthetic of nature. The model incorporates the following necessary components for motivating our students to achieve: meet their needs (Durik & Harackiewicz, 2003), support their expectancies (Wigfield & Eccles, 2002), construct tasks that they value (Summers, Schallert, & Ritter, 2003), and provide opportunities for prosocial learning (Wentzel, 1998). We will present the model, evidence of the validity of each component of the model as demonstrated in other related content areas, examples of how the model might function in geoscience classrooms, and plans for testing of the model. We argue that connections between affect and cognition are critical for improving instruction, recruitment and retention of students from diverse groups.