Motivation – no, it’s not 90% of learning, but it does matter to an extent
Motivation has long been a ‘hot topic’ in education, seen by some (see recent claims that ‘motivation is 90% of learning’) as one, if not the key aim of teachers, and by others as merely the outcome of attainment and mastery.
But what does research actually say? Firstly, there is a lot of it! Motivation has been and remains a very popular research topic. Secondly, what it actually means can be quite confusing. When I looked at some of the more recent meta-analyses and longitudinal studies on this, it was clear that motivation refers to a lot of different-but-related things in different studies, which is unfortunately very common in educational research.
