In Education, Motivation is Everywhere

Daniel Muijs is right about the effect sizes – and wrong about what they mean

Daniel Muijs – Professor of Education at Queen’s, Belfast, former Head of Research at England’s schools inspectorate Ofsted, co-author of one of the standard texts on effective teaching – is about as central to the evidence-informed movement as it gets. Last week, he published a post reviewing what the research says about motivation and learning.

Here’s what he concluded:

yes, it is worth using strategies that improve motivation in the classroom, but it is more important to use strategies that enhance attainment, learning and competence in students.

I read it with interest. As a teacher, some days it feels like my whole job consists of finding ways to motivate students. I was intrigued, therefore, to find out that motivation might not be as central to education as I thought.

I’ve also spent a fair bit of time reading about and researching motivation. My PhD is on the role of curiosity in science education. Neuroscientists define curiosity as the intrinsic motivation to learn, so motivation is central to my thesis. Muijs is right that the research is complicated and there’s a lot of it. But I think there’s a story he didn’t quite get across.

Motivation comes from the Latin motivus: movement towards something. The key question for me as a teacher was always whether students were moving themselves through their learning – intrinsic motivation – or whether it was down to me to move them – extrinsic motivation – with carrots like praise and house points, or sticks like detentions and phone calls home.

I’m a realist. I still use the carrots and sticks. But I always thought that if I could tip the balance towards students wanting to learn the material for its own sake, the whole business might become more enjoyable for everyone. Which is why I was wary of Muijs’s conclusion. I worry some readers will come away with the impression that motivation is a minor character in the story of learning. A nice-to-have. An optional extra, once the serious business of attainment is sorted.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Where he’s right

The literature on motivation is messy. Muijs lists some of the ways in which ‘motivation’ has been interpreted: inner drive, self-efficacy, mastery orientation, interest, mindset beliefs. This does make motivation’s effects hard to aggregate. And he’s right to be wary of anyone selling motivation as the key to learning. The ‘90% of learning’ claim he opens with appears to come from Alpha School, the Austin ‘2-Hour Learning’ AI school, whose blog announces that ‘ed-tech is only 10 percent of the solution; motivated students are the other 90 percent’. I’m also sceptical of these claims – it has the ring of a headline in search of a citation.

But having (rightly) pointed out that motivation isn’t one thing, Muijs’s post goes on to draw a single conclusion about it – ‘the effect is modest’. That’s where things start to go wrong.

Problem one: ‘focus on competence instead’ is a motivational strategy

Here’s the strange thing about telling teachers to prioritise ‘attainment, learning and competence’ over motivation. The most influential contemporary theory of intrinsic motivation is self-determination theory, and it’s right there in the studies Muijs draws on. It holds that intrinsic motivation grows out of three basic psychological needs: autonomy, relatedness and competence.

Autonomy is often taken to mean the amount of choice a student has, but it’s subtler than that – it’s about perceived volition and ownership. A student given three tasks to choose from, with no idea what’s going on and no interest in the larger objective, won’t feel autonomous. A student with only one option, who endorses the goal and understands what they’re doing, will.

Relatedness is a feeling of connection: being respected and valued by teachers and peers in the learning environment. But if SDT is a three-legged stool, England’s is wobbling. For far too many students, the relatedness leg is shorter than the others. The proportion of students feeling supported by classmates and teachers has plummeted over the past decade, especially among girls, as I showed recently using the WHO’s HBSC figures.

Competence, finally, is not a test score. A student with near-full marks who obsesses over the ones they missed can feel less competent than a lower-scoring student who senses they’re mastering the basics. Competence is related to attainment, but it’s a subjective sense of getting somewhere – not the same thing.

So competence isn’t an alternative to motivation. In the dominant theory of the field, it’s one of the psychological needs from which intrinsic motivation grows. When a student experiences themselves genuinely improving – well-judged challenge, success that feels earned, feedback that shows the gap closing – their motivation rises. And note that the principal evidence Muijs cites, the Howard et al. (2021) meta-analysis, is itself a meta-analysis of self-determination theory. His own evidence base is organised around a framework in which competence feeds motivation.

The advice ‘build competence rather than motivation’, then, isn’t ranking two alternatives. It’s setting motivation against one of its own ingredients. A teacher who engineers early success for a struggling reader is doing attainment-building and motivation-building in the same act. The dichotomy the conclusion rests on doesn’t exist.

Problem two: ‘modest’ doesn’t survive disaggregation

Here’s what’s odd about the ‘modest’ summary: the stronger numbers are in Muijs’s own post.

He reports, from the Toste et al. meta-analysis, that intrinsic motivation correlates with reading achievement at .32 and competency beliefs at .28 – and he correctly labels these ‘moderate’. It’s the loosely defined constructs – attitudes, generic ‘interest’ – that drag the pooled average down.

And is .32 modest anyway? By Cohen’s old rules of thumb it’s moderate; by the benchmarks now used for educational field research – where an intervention shifting outcomes by a couple of months’ progress is a success worth funding – it’s a substantial relationship.¹

Two reasons the true relationship is probably understated even by these figures.

First, meta-analyses of this literature inherit its definitional chaos: pool forty studies measuring forty subtly different things and you attenuate everything. (Muijs flags this limitation himself, to be fair – though he then leans exclusively on meta-analyses anyway.) Look at studies that isolate a well-defined construct and the pattern becomes more coherent. Taylor and colleagues (2014), across multiple school and college samples, found intrinsic motivation was the only motivation type to consistently predict achievement over time, controlling for prior achievement – exactly the construct that tops the meta-analytic tables, behaving exactly as SDT predicts.

Second, we’re only ever studying students who already have some motivation. Everyone in these datasets turned up, opened the booklet and answered the questions. The genuinely unmotivated student is the empty chair – and many of the students for whom motivation is most consequential are partly missing from the data altogether: persistent absentees, school refusers, early leavers. When you compute a correlation on a variable with its bottom end sliced off, the number you get is smaller than the true relationship. We are, in effect, measuring how much extra motivation matters among the already-somewhat-motivated. And still finding .3.

Problem three: a loop is not a league table

The most interesting evidence in Muijs’s post is the longitudinal work – Vu et al.’s finding that attainment influences motivation roughly twice as strongly as the reverse, with both directions significant. A reciprocal relationship: success breeds motivation breeds success. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that because the average arrow is fatter in one direction, teachers should prioritise that direction.

For one thing, look inside Vu’s results: self-belief – the construct closest to SDT’s competence – was the one form of motivation that significantly drove later achievement. The loop’s motivational arrow runs through exactly the territory SDT predicts.

For another, a feedback loop doesn’t come with a ranking of its own components. The practical question for a teacher is never ‘which arrow is fatter on average across 60,000 students?’ It’s ‘what’s the best way to help the student in front of me learn?’ And for the disengaged student – the one this debate is really about – ‘raise their attainment first’ is circular advice. They won’t attain, because they won’t engage. The accessible entry point into the loop is motivational: make the next success reachable, make it feel earned, make the subject worth a second look. Or check the other legs of the stool – is it ownership of the learning goals that’s missing? A lack of connection to classmates or teacher?

That this route then works through attainment isn’t an argument against it. That’s just what a virtuous cycle is.

Where I’m more sceptical than Muijs

There is one point on which I’m more pessimistic than he is: what we can do for students who lack intrinsic motivation.

Showing that motivation matters is not the same as showing we can reliably boost it. IQ is among the strongest correlates of test success ever measured, but nobody runs IQ-boosting assemblies. The last two decades of motivation-adjacent interventions should make us humble: growth mindset went from ministerial speeches to a 100-school EEF trial that found no average extra progress, and grit is currently making the same journey through the Department for Education’s press office. In my own rough analysis of PISA 2022, curiosity had a stronger relationship with attainment than either.²

In my view, we have better evidence that motivation matters than that we can manufacture it on demand. Anyone reading this post as a licence for motivational interventions has read it backwards.

What to do when motivation is everywhere

Muijs and I agree that motivation predicts attainment and vice versa, and even agree on the numbers. Where we differ is over motivation’s role in learning. He treats it as one variable in the model, to be weighed against the others and ranked. I think it’s closer to the lens through which almost everything teachers do takes effect. Behaviour policy affects motivation. Curriculum affects motivation. Assessment, feedback, explanations, relationships, the level of challenge – all of it shapes whether students keep moving through their learning, whether we track it or not. And motivation, in turn, shapes their learning: it’s at work wherever effortful learning – that is, the kind schools deal in – happens. It’s there every lesson, every day.

And rather than concluding that a messy field yields a ‘modest’ effect, I’d say the messiness is the finding. Tease the constructs apart and the well-defined ones – intrinsic motivation, beliefs about one’s own competence – turn out to be among the more substantial relationships in education research, sitting in Muijs’s own sources, correctly labelled, waiting to be taken seriously.

So rather than telling teachers that attainment matters more than motivation, I’d stop treating them as rivals. The teacher engineering early success, calibrating challenge and showing students their own progress isn’t choosing attainment over motivation – they’re doing both at once, because in a loop there is no ‘instead’.

1. Strictly speaking, Kraft’s benchmarks are built for causal effects from trials; correlations like these tend to run larger, so treat the comparison as a rough sense of scale.

2. Nobody is selling curiosity posters. I think we should keep it that way, for various reasons – now isn’t the time for a ‘curiosity intervention’. Maybe it never will be.