The psychology of independent study

How good would it be if all students were intrinsically motivated? How good would it be if all staff were intrinsically motivated, all the time?

Pondering these questions in the summer break, I pictured a eutopia of higher productivity: bean bags for chairs, a water slide that enabled one to progress from the second floor to the lower ground, and a chocolate fondue as a centre piece in the achievement centre. Everyone was autonomous in their thinking and actions, striving towards self-improvement. Journal Club was packed every week, duties were manned early, classroom display borders were indestructible, and the local coffeeshop baristas were so pumped by our excited demeanours that they were compelled to provide us with free flat whites on tap. I saw myself as a sort of Coach Prime of education circles, sponsored by Amazon, welcoming A-List celebrities into our building, zooming down the corridors on a Segway and offering snippets of wisdom to all. Those who can, want to teach, and the net result was better outcomes for students, less workload for staff and the metaphorical ‘bar’ on what ‘life ready’ (our college’s mission) means raised several notches as the happy and eager faces of EVERYONE in the building moved towards excellence together.

Then I came to in my office staring at the PowerPoint I had produced, nervously anticipating my opening address of the year to my staff. It was Inset, late August, and a month of down time had left me feeling somewhat anxious at the thought of starting another academic year with the big speech. I asked myself a question that I planned to repeat to my staff in five minutes’ time: ‘Are you intrinsically motivated right now?’ Deci and Ryan (2000) define intrinsic motivation as ‘doing something because it is inherently interesting or enjoyable.’ I like to think of myself as a positive, resilient person who rises to the challenge of daily life. I love my job; I see it as a privilege and thrive on the variety and challenge that each day brings. But, after a week’s all-inclusive in the Balearics and precious time with my young family, my answer was probably ‘not fully, no.’ Being at college was important to me, it aligned with my values, I wanted to see the staff and convey my message - but I couldn’t honestly say I was enjoying this feeling. Should I have felt guilty at not feeling intrinsically motivated at that time?

My quest to learn more about motivational strategies came following a desire to improve independent study at our college and a general interest in psychology from the days when I used to play sport. Although I did not understand motivational theory at the time, I understood that there were different motivators, and that sometimes commitment had to kick in where motivation was not present. But college is not sport, and we cannot always replicate the extreme challenges that are created through competition and the resulting togetherness and camaraderie. Motivation in a college context is broader: it requires more sensitivity, more creativity, and needs to cater for a wildly diverse audience. Then there is the highly debated matter of resilience and character amongst young people, something which I am not even going to attempt to provide an insight on. I just knew that in our context, and with the highly capable and conscientious group of staff that we had available, we could have some impact on student motivation if we chose to put it in our crosshairs.

In 2023, independent study was already well-established at my college. Staff typically set five hours per subject per week, and independent study was checked within lessons and was integrated into the conduct and reward systems. Clear strategies existed for the teaching of revision, and students were well-versed in our expectations and general messaging around completing independent study. But on the flip side, the impact of independent study was not properly measured, parents were not informed well enough about the specifics of independent study setting, and with a completion rate of about 85-90%, it was not having the impact it could have.

After consultation with college leaders, we designed an independent study strategy that focused on seven priorities.

1. College opening times for independent study
2. Termly mapping of independent study
3. How we teach independent study at TSFA
4. Factoring for the ebbs and flows of college life
5. Clear independent study systems
6. Independent study quality assurance
7. Student motivation and independent study.

To provide more knowledge and credibility to our approach, we opted to bring in some heavyweights to help convey our strategy. We targeted our staff and our Pupil Leadership Group (PLG) during Inset in late August. We reached out to two practicing psychologists to find out whether Self Determination Theory (SDT), which looks at motivation as a spectrum and which I first came across in a Blog 6 article by Stuart Kime, was a suitable model to pursue in relation to our independent study strategy. Rich Hampson was working in elite sport at the time. He had previously worked within Andy Murray’s back-room team, had worked with British Cycling and just returned from the Paris Olympics when he visited the college to speak to our teams. He presented SDT as a concept and gave an insight into how three components of support are fundamental to its success:

1. Autonomy refers to an individual feeling that they choose their behaviour and that it is aligned with their values and interests. Students need to feel like they have at least some control over their lives and behaviours. This can be difficult to achieve in a college setting, where rules are inevitably a big part of daily practice and are an effective facilitator of what can accurately be described as a consequential behavioural approach (sanction and reward). The key here is to provide opportunities, wherever possible, and to always explain the rationale (the why) for our decisions. Lessons, tasks, activities and independent study should be approached with this in mind: can there be any autonomy embedded without compromising your mission and goal? If not, say why. 

2. Competence means feeling capable of producing desired outcomes and avoiding undesirable ones. Much has been written about using ‘desirably difficult’ (Bjork & Bjork, 2020) tasks that help students feel a sense of accomplishment. A desirably difficult task is one that is sufficiently challenging for a student at their current state of knowledge, understanding, or skill. It may be different for every individual—for instance, a desirably difficult challenge for a poorly organised student might be to get to class on time with IS complete. As such, if a teacher wants to support students’ feelings of competence using this approach, ensuring that tasks are ‘pitched’ at the appropriate ‘challenge point’ is paramount. At TSFA our move to a ‘keep your target grade’-focused assessment strategy is a step in the right direction for competence enhancement amongst students.  

3. Relatedness means feeling connected with, and mutually supported by, other people. Such relatedness can emerge when students feel that their teachers genuinely like them, respect them and value them as individuals (Bao & Lam, 2008; Niemiec & Ryan, 2009). Simply taking steps to get to know students as individuals, or to help them know and connect with others (peers or teammates, for example), can be powerful. This third strand tends to come very naturally to most staff - relationships with students are usually a major strength of any good college. 

Following Rich’s introduction to SDT, staff were asked to reflect on how they offered autonomy support, relatedness support, and competence support (or ARC in short) to the students under their care. Much of the discussion was around relatedness, and in many ways, this just came naturally to people. Staff want to work with young people because, funnily enough, they like young people and want them to like their subjects and be happy and successful individuals. But some of the discussions and sharing of best practice revealed subtle but impactful techniques that our staff had found useful; for example, learning names quickly, holding doors and greeting students sincerely, challenging young people privately and empathetically, and being very consistent and straight to the point with praise. The competence support discussion was also interesting. Any notion of catching students out and using assessment simply to find out the exact status of students’ progress against a set of exam questions was discarded quickly in favour of only assessing students on what they had been taught properly, both in terms of knowledge and skills. Yes, a 12-mark question might be crucial in a final exam, but if the best student in the class is only likely to score 50% at best, early in their two-year programme, it is not useful to ask them to tackle a 12-mark question and will probably do more damage from a motivational point of view than good. It wasn’t a blanket ‘No, don’t do that,’ but more ‘Justify the benefits of that approach over the damage that you might do to motivation.’ It really got people thinking and has led to significant changes in the way that we assessed our learners. The last of the three, autonomy support, is by far the hardest to achieve and for that we turned to Professor Putwain.

Professor David Putwain visited the college several times and presented SDT research at the bi-annual Trinity MAT Culture conference involving all front facing staff in our Trust. He was clear that in the UK education system, even at sixth form level, student autonomy is often very difficult to establish. In a system that is centred on students acquiring knowledge from a teacher, where we encourage professional workplace-like conduct with consequence systems, and with clear college measures of progress (Ofsted, published results) often impacting on the success, reputation, funding and longevity of the organisation, one cannot simply pass the baton over. But we can still positively influence motivation by drawing attention to the challenge of autonomy support (offer it where you can and take risks) and through always explaining the rationale behind decisions that do not promote autonomy (similar to the messages by Simon Sinek in Start With Why).

David also referenced a paper entitled ‘A Classification System for Teachers’ Motivational Behaviours Recommended in Self-Determination Theory Interventions’ (Ahmadi et. al., 2023). Within this paper, the authors illustrate the behaviours of teachers that support or thwart progress across the three components of SDT: autonomy, relatedness and support. It makes for interesting reading and challenges some quite established practices. He also facilitated the production and approval of a list of forty behaviours that we believed were essential at TSFA to provide ARC support and subsequently motivate students.

At the time of writing, we are two terms into the full implementation of our independent study strategy. It is early days, but IS completion rates are up approximately 10%, the quality of work produced through independent study is reported as being higher, and there is a culture of value around independent study through student voice and quality assurance that is difficult to quantify in data. College retention is at 98% in Year 12 and 95% in Year 13, attendance is at 95%, and internal progress scores are the highest on record. It is early days, but the data is already telling us good things. Professor Putwain has also commissioned a research study at the college, which will help us evaluate the impact of our work on independent study. The study will broadly investigate how the implementation of ARC support is perceived by students, its impact on their outcomes, and whether changes exist between different student groups. Data will be collected four times across the college year and follow studies can then be repeated at a subject level, giving us an ability in the future to almost measure the motivational culture between subjects. Stay tuned!

Michael Fitzsimons is principal of Trinity Sixth Form Academy in Halifax. A longer version of this article with more detail on implementation can be found here, as published in the Trinity MAT's in-house Sparke journal.