Review by: Hasanbegovic, Jasmina (2005-01-04)

The presented study investigated what intrinsically motivated vs. not intrinsically motivated students actually did in an electronic learning environment that was designed as a game-like realistic simulation in which students had to play the role of a junior consultant.

The authors introduced their article with recent results of motivation research structured according to the Cognitive Evaluation Theory (CET) of Ryan and Deci whereby the perception of certain aspects of the social and task environment like a sense of relatedness, control or competence are crucial. Martens et al show that the effects of intrinsic motivation on student learning have often been studied, but complain that the process via which intrinsic motivation influences dependent variables like self-regulation, deep level learning and curiosity is unknown. Especially for eLearning it is important to look insight how motivation leads to cognition to be able to analyse if developers really manage to increase motivation with the programs they develop. This study examines how intrinsic motivation relates to user behaviour in e-learning analysing what happens in the game cycle in the centre of an input-process-outcome instructional game model. In order to analyse the impact of intrinsic motivation on the process, the actual students’ study activities are measured directly via the analysis of log files which enable the straightforward assessment of quantitative and qualitative differences in study behaviour between the two types of participants.

In line with the motivation theory of Ryan and Deci it is predicted and evidenced that intrinsically motivated students do more in a fixed time period as a result of their higher effort and persistence and will do different things in computer environments that allow for this liberty of choice. 33 higher education students were randomly assigned to one of the two experimental conditions – student vs. programme control over the task – and worked within an authentic learning programme through the three phases of first conducting an interview with the functionaries, second doing work floor research and third writing a reflection report. After the experiment, students’ performances were measured with a multiple choice test concerning the content of the programme and the quality of the reflection reports judged on the number of correct content statements that they contained. Intrinsic motivation was measured with a 5-point scale consisting of 6 items. The design of the authentic learning programme made it possible to count the total number of pages or items that students visited and to sort which pages where explorative and which not.

The results show that intrinsically motivated participants are relatively more explorative and do qualitatively different things. Moreover, the correlation between intrinsic motivation and measured explorative study behaviour is confirmed by students’ self-reported inclination to explore the environment. No correlation between the multiple-choice-test, the number of content statements in the reflection report and intrinsic motivation was available.

Finally, the authors discuss the results of the study linking them to existing studies and giving some critical remarks and limitations about their study according to the restricted number of subjects, the restricted time on task and the types of assessment methods.This study introduces into the field of motivation research from the process perspective and gives first insight how intrinsic motivation influences the exploration within the learning process. Of great importance would be to examine in what way the intrinsic motivated students do qualitatively different things in detail. Certainly, other variables like selfregulation, deep level learning have to be considered in further studies. In addition, the study demonstrates the effectiveness of log files analysis as assessment of study behaviour. However, further investigation is necessary to validate this kind of analysis.