There’s an old Far Side comic where a man reads a sign that says “juggling chainsaws strictly forbidden” and suddenly feels the urge to juggle chainsaws. While a bit extreme, this cartoon captures a fundamental human tendency, known in the psychology literature as “reactance”. Put simply, nobody likes to be told what to do, and when people feel that their autonomy is being threatened, they push back to reclaim it. Indeed, the desire to preserve and express one’s autonomy is one of the three pillars of self-determination theory, one of the pre-eminent theories of intrinsic motivation.
But despite a huge body of evidence that respecting autonomy has tremendous positive impacts on motivation, achievement and general well-being, there is a curious absence of autonomy-promoting interventions in higher education. When my colleague Simon Cullen and I looked at more than 2 million documents posted on teaching and learning websites from prominent universities, we found that fewer than one in 5,000 even mentioned autonomy. It was cited nearly 50 times less frequently than belonging and 20 times less frequently than mastery (the two other pillars of the motivational tripod).
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Why might this be? One reason is that professors worry that students who are given choice will choose poorly. For example, we know that students who attend class learn more but when attendance is optional, some students choose not to show up, hurting their academic progress. To resolve this, many faculty mandate attendance, imposing penalties on students who skip class. This can improve attendance but comes at the expense of autonomy.
As a result, while mandatory attendance may boost grades, it also undermines students’ intrinsic motivation to learn. Indeed, students under mandatory attendance regimes acknowledge that they learn more but give lower course evaluations and report feeling less engaged and less likely to take future classes on the topic. So, how can we get students to make good decisions while still allowing them agency to make their own choices, maintaining the associated motivational advantages that agency provides? One possibility is to use choice architecture, more commonly called “nudges”: structuring choices in ways that scaffold better decisions without dictating them.
Consider optional-mandatory attendance. Unlike standard mandatory attendance policies in which the professor mandates obligatory attendance, in an optional-mandatory regime, each student chooses for him or herself whether to opt in to mandatory attendance. Those who opt in face penalties for absences; those who don’t don’t. To encourage buy-in, students who opt in can receive extra credit, lighter exam loads or perks such as choosing teammates for group work.
When we implemented this policy, we found that between 80 and 95 per cent of students opted in to mandatory attendance – a far greater percentage than most faculty we surveyed expected. And in a randomised controlled trial study, students randomly assigned to an optional-mandatory section of the class came to class more frequently, participated more actively and reported greater motivation and learning and a more positive overall course experience than students randomly assigned to traditional mandatory attendance sections. As one student put it in course evaluations: “I think optional-mandatory attendance is a beautiful system that I wish other classes employed. Giving students the autonomy to choose to make lecture [sic] mandatory made me noticeably more encouraged to make it to class.”
But autonomy does not have to be limited to attendance policy. In another study, students who were allowed to opt in to doing harder homework assignments overwhelmingly did so (nearly 90 per cent), spent more time on the homework and received better scores on their assignments. When logistics permit, students can be given choices on due dates for assignments, which topics will be covered in class, how different course elements are weighted in final grades or any number of other course policies. Any course element that is typically mandatory could be revised to become optional-mandatory.
Autonomy-granting interventions don’t just improve motivation, they give students practice at being better decision-makers, and can provide helpful flexibility to their lives. Many students have obligations outside class, such as caregiving duties, jobs to help pay for school, medical issues; when we deprive students of choice, we impose our priorities on lives that we don’t fully understand.
Higher education rightly emphasises the importance of belonging and mastery, but when it ignores autonomy – the third leg of the motivational tripod – the system wobbles. When we allow students to decide for themselves how they’ll engage with their coursework, they consistently rise to the occasion. They choose to challenge themselves, perform better academically and enjoy their education more.
None of us wants students juggling chainsaws in our classes but it turns out that if we let them make properly scaffolded choices, they don’t reach for the chainsaws at all.
Danny Oppenheimer is professor jointly appointed in psychology and decision sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. He researches judgement, decision-making, metacognition, learning and causal reasoning, and applies his findings to domains such as charitable giving, consumer behaviour and how to trick students into buying him ice cream.
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