Mistake Detection Videos to Improve Students’ Motivation in Math

This article describes the design case of an instructional experience incorporating videos of mistakes for students to practice mistake detection and recovery skills. Learning from mistakes is often encouraged, but students may need prac- tical support to address them e ectively. The intention of this design is to facilitate adaptive cognitive and emotional responses to handling mistakes. This article documents two distinct but related formats of a mistake recovery design: a personal video recording and pre-recorded videos featuring fourth grade mathematics. These two formats evolved from personal experiences to become a classroom intervention. We trace this design process including the context, theory, and implementation experiences that shaped the design and discuss unforeseen obstacles and design alterations that arose during this process

Even Einstein Struggled: Effects of Learning About Great Scientists’ Struggles on High School Students’ Motivation to Learn Science

Students’ beliefs that success in science depends on exceptional talent negatively impact their motivation to learn. For example, such beliefs have been shown to be a major factor steering students away from taking science and math courses in high school and college. In the present study, we tested a novel story-based instruction that models how scientists achieve through failures and struggles. We designed this instruction to challenge this belief, thereby improving science learning in classroom settings. A demographically diverse group of 402 9th and 10th grade students read 1 of 3 types of stories about eminent scientists that described how the scientists (a) struggled intellectually (e.g., made mistakes in investigating scientific problems, and overcame the mistakes through effort), (b) struggled in their personal life (e.g., suffered family poverty and lack of parental support but overcame it), or (c) made great discoveries (a control condition, similar to the instructional material that appears in many science textbooks, that did not describe any struggles). Results showed that participation in either of the struggle story conditions improved science learning postintervention, relative to that of students in the control condition. Additionally, the effect of our intervention was more pronounced for low-performing students. Moreover, far more students in either of the struggle story conditions felt connected to the stories and scientists than did students in the control condition. The use of struggle stories provides a promising and implementable instructional approach that can improve student motivation and academic performance in science and perhaps other subjects as well

Motivating Students’ STEM Learning Using Biographical Information

Science instruction has focused on teaching students scientific content knowledge and problem-solving skills. However, even the best content instruction does not guarantee improved learning, as students’ motivation ultimately determines whether or not they will take advantage of the content. The goal of our instruction is to address the “leaky STEM pipeline” problem and retain more students in STEM fields. We designed a struggle-oriented instruction that tells stories about how even the greatest scientists struggled and failed prior to their discoveries. We describe how we have gone about designing this instruction to increase students’ motivation and better prepare them to interact and engage with content knowledge. We first discuss why we took this struggle-oriented approach to instruction by delineating the limitations of content-focused science instruction, especially from a motivational standpoint. Second, we detail how we designed and implemented this instruction in schools, outlining the factors that influenced our decisions under specific situational constraints. Finally, we discuss implications for future designers interested in utilizing this approach to instruction