One of the contributors to this interesting volume reveals some cognitive dissonance:
Educational psychology's treatment of the relationships between motivation, learning and academic performance for Higher Education students could be seen as the tilling of an already overworked, even sterile, field. Indeed, orthodox educational psychology has offered little of real significance and value that has improved upon McKeachie's (1961) research in the early 1960s . . ..
If this is so, then why this volume? However, Alan Bleakley is overstating what he elsewhere calls the "intellectual stagnation" of motivation studies, in the process of making an interesting case for "learning as an aesthetic practice." He wants to reinvolve beauty, desire, even eros in learning--along the lines laid out by Socrates (and Allan Bloom's 1993 book, Love and Friendship). He recommends an "aesthetically sculpted passion" which has been "driven underground in the post-modern world of Higher Education, with its programmes, goals, competencies, and unconditional championing of instrumental reason." He has a surprising discussion of the ugliness of the learning environment--the classroom--as a hindrance to motivation.
Bleakley's is the most interesting--if perhaps not the most useful--essay in this book, but there are several others that offer much to the thoughtful teacher. Martin Luck's "Undergraduate Research Projects: Motivation and Skills Development" has some lessons for the faculty member suspicious of the current fashion for undergraduate research--or for the faculty who believe it is a good thing but might be hard put to say why.
Stephen Newstead's "Individual Differences in Student Motivation" relates frequency of, and reasons for, cheating to reasons motivating higher study and finds some connections which seem strong to me.
Ron Iphofen, in "Understanding Motives in Learning: Mature Students and Learner Responsibility," takes a very sensible approach to the disconnect between the motives learners actually have and those that faculty would like for them to have, not to mention the motives the faculty think they remember having when they were students. He makes a number of good suggestions including awareness of differences in learning styles, sharing success tricks, and matching rhetoric: "Learners need to be convinced of the 'good reasons' for learning particular things."
Several essays attempt to make distinctions between the sexes, between different fields of study, and between non-traditional (British "mature") students and 18-21-year-olds. These chapters, like others, accept a kind of tripartite division of motivations, suggesting that learners take approaches that are deep, surface, or some tertium quid called variously achieving or strategic. The findings are not entirely consistent: the authors of "Age, Gender and Course Differences in Approaches to Studying in First-Year Undergraduate Students" claim that female students (by their own report, apparently) are "more likely to adopt a Deep Approach to their studies . . . than male students. The male students, on the other hand, were more likely to adopt a Surface Approach . . . than the female students . . .." Yes, but Kay Greasley's "Does Gender Affect Students' Approaches to Learning?" reports that "As females show a tendency to favour a surface approach, one may suspect males will show a preference for a deep approach and from looking at Table 11.1 it can be seen that there is a statistically significant relationship . . . with men favouring a deep approach." This flat (and unexplained) contradiction does not inspire confidence.
But there is much here that does. The chapters range from fairly theoretical to rather pointedly empirical.
This is another in the Kogan Page series, published in association with the Staff and Educational Development Association and distributed here by Stylus publications. It provides--in addition to good thinking on motivation--a sociological glimpse of British higher education. One point that struck me is that most of the British contributors (there are some from Australia and New Zealand) are from the former polytechnic (or "new universities" or 1992 universities, after the year in which they were all transformed into universities) range of the higher education system--such places as the University of Brighton, the University of Northumbria, or Nottingham Trent University. Why this should be so is not clear, unless a more strongly student-centered ethic prevails there.
And Phil Race provides a list of recent changes in UK higher education which, he plausibly argues, "are damaging the links between good teaching and effective learning." These include increasing percentages of the population entering higher education, increased bureaucracy, pressure to publish, larger numbers to teach, and many more students working part-time. It is a depressing list, but one which (combined with "the growth in consumerism in society") will resonate with many American readers. In fact, with the single exception that these authors use "assessment" to mean graded work (exams and essays) by students rather than something to which instructors or courses are subjected, this will be a valuable book for any American teacher or teaching center.
Merritt Moseley
UNC-Asheville