Lesson3: Principle III. Provide Multiple Means of Engagement

Principle III. Provide Multiple Means of Engagement

Students differ markedly in the ways in which they can be engaged or motivated to learn. Some students are highly engaged by spontaneity and novelty while other are disengaged, even frightened, by those aspects, preferring strict routine. In reality, there is no one means of representation that will be optimal for all students; providing multiple options for engagement is therefore essential.

Guideline 7: Provide options for recruiting interest

nformation that is not attended to, that does not engage a student's cognition, is in fact inaccessible. It is inaccessible both in the moment—relevant information goes unnoticed and unprocessed—and in the future—relevant information is unlikely to be remembered. As a result, teachers devote considerable time and effort to recruiting student attention and engagement. But students differ significantly in what attracts their attention and engages their interest. Even the same student will differ over time and circumstance; their interests change as they develop and gain new knowledge and skills, as their biological environments change, and as they differentiate into self-determined adolescents and adults. It is therefore important to have alternative means of recruiting student interest, means that reflect the important inter- and intra-individual differences among students.

Guideline 8: Provide options for sustaining effort and persistence

Many kinds of learning, particularly the learning of skills and strategies, require sustained attention and effort. When motivated to do so, many students can regulate their attention and affect in order to sustain the effort and concentration that such learning requires. However, students differ considerably in their ability to self-regulate in this way. Their differences reflect disparities in their initial motivation, their capacity and skills for self-regulation, their susceptibility to contextual interference, and so forth. A key instructional goal is to build individual self-regulation and self-determination skills, which will help equalize such learning opportunities (seeGuideline 9). In the meantime, however, the external environment must provide options that can equalize accessibility by supporting students who differ in initial motivation, self-regulation skills, etc.

Guideline 9: Provide options for self-regulation

While it is important to design the extrinsic environment so that it can support motivation and engagement (see Guidelines 7 and 8), it is also important to develop students’ intrinsic abilities to regulate their own emotions and motivations. The ability to self-regulate—to strategically modulate one’s emotional reactions or states in order to cope or engage with the environment more effectively—is a critical aspect of human development. While many individuals develop self-regulatory skills on their own, either by trial and error or by observing successful adults, many others have significant difficulty developing these skills. Unfortunately, most classrooms do not address these skills explicitly, leaving them as part of the “implicit” curriculum that is often inaccessible or invisible to many. Furthermore, classrooms that explicitly address self-regulation generally assume a single model or method for doing so. As in other kinds of learning, considerable individual differences are much more likely than uniformity. A successful approach therefore requires providing sufficient alternatives to support learners with very different aptitudes and prior experience in learning to effectively manage their own engagement and affect.