How to Set Up Collaborative Learning to Boost Intrinsic Motivation

Picture this: Your students are working on a group assignment where students compete against other groups in a classroom game, and the reward for success is a collective team prize. What do we usually see happen in this situation? This scene often ends with one or two students dominating the work in each group, completing most or all of the tasks, while others contribute little. The resulting conflicts within the team can erode motivation and lead to frustration and resentment, ultimately crushing students’ collaborative spirits, leaving some students disengaged and others feeling overwhelmed.

Participation equity is the foundation of collaborative learning; when students are working in groups, we want to ensure that all students have the opportunity to contribute and engage. Participation leads to a more diverse exchange of ideas where every voice is heard, and every contribution is valued. One way to this is through fostering intrinsic motivation.  

Fostering intrinsic motivation 

Our goal as educators is to have classrooms full of hardworking students intrinsically motivated by collaboration and a love of learning and challenge. Positive feedback is the only reward that has been shown to facilitate intrinsic motivation instead of compromising it. 

What this can look like in the classroom: Emphasize effort over correctness during collaborative activities. Rather than rewarding groups solely for “leading the pack,” also reward them for critical thinking processes such as attention to detail, strategy implementation, communication skills, and use of contextualized language. When considering how to offer these process rewards, make sure that it acknowledges something any group or individual learner feels capable of replicating, so that students can more easily understand how their contributions are valued and assessed.

Thinking about rewards: Tangible rewards, ranging from dollar bills to marshmallows, undercut intrinsic motivation, even when offered to students as signals of competence. However, intrinsic motivation is not affected when a reward is unanticipated or not dependent on task performance. For example, if you consistently reward correct answers with stickers, students may focus more on the sticker than on engaging with the content. But if you give every learner a surprise sticker on Friday for demonstrating effort or participation throughout the week, they‘ll be more inclined to remain motivated by the joy of learning. Since they weren’t expecting the reward and it’s not tied to a specific performance, the sticker remains a pleasant, positive reinforcement rather than a controlling reward. 

3 Ways to Infuse Intrinsic Motivation into Collaborative Learning

Structured roles: Collaborative learning activities with structured roles promote intrinsic motivation by fostering a sense of ownership among students with clear expectations. When group roles are clearly defined, students embrace their responsibilities without the confusion or anxiety that comes with uncertainty. Collaboration with structured roles also promotes task interdependence, requiring learners to acknowledge the value of each other’s contributions.

In an effort to provide scaffolding for students who may struggle with certain aspects of the group’s tasks, I routinely assign roles such as notetaker, timekeeper, and speaker to ensure that no students feel left behind or overburdened. Rotating these roles also maintains active learning experiences, which can lead to extended time on task.

Reciprocal teaching is a comprehension and critical thinking strategy whereby student-led groups work together to parse a text. Reciprocal teaching utilizes structured roles to promote collaborative learning and establish deeper text connections through interactive coordinated discussions. I assign students rotating roles to navigate group discussions such as summarizer, questioner, clarifier, predictor, and sometimes facilitator, depending on group sizes. Reciprocal teaching not only empowers students to become more introspective about their learning, but also supports partnership-building among classmates, which can also increase intrinsic motivation. 

Unanticipated-incentive gamification: Before every summative assessment, I love playing collaborative review games to engage all students in reinforcing learning through discussion and shared responsibility. Unfortunately, a key aspect of many classroom games is extrinsic motivation, which can narrowly steer students to undertake participation either for tangible reward or to avoid fear-branding, either of which comes with minimal appreciation for the accumulation of skill or knowledge itself. 

My students’ favorite review game to play is called Stinky Feet, which utilizes a “numbered heads together” structure where learners collaborate in answering questions posed by the teacher. Stinky Feet is packed with intrinsic motivation due to its “mystery points” twist that keeps students working until the very end. Traditionally, the team with the most, or least, points at the end receives some sort of tangible group reward. I hear the game’s title was derived from a teacher allowing the winning team to take their shoes off for the rest of the day—not a suggestion, just an anecdote.

I adapt the reward structure so that every group stays in the game until its conclusion (i.e., run out of class time, questions, or point-value cards). Instead of students’ knowing beforehand the qualifications of winning the game, I randomly select two students at the end to either flip a coin or play rock-paper-scissors to determine if the “winning team” has the most or least points. When the outcome is kept ambiguous until the end, students enjoy the suspense without their intrinsic motivation being undermined, as the reward is now just an unexpected bonus. 

Relevance: Explicitly having students connect the relevance of a collaborative activity to their experiences and identities prioritizes effort over correctness, as it recognizes their participation and engagement more than their achieving the “right” answer. When students do not recognize the applicability of what they are doing in the classroom, their intrinsic motivation to learn may wane.

Similar to providing students with strategies for making connections to text (i.e., text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world), creating space for students to better understand and to make logical inferences about group tasks helps them to make direct connections with those tasks. I use a Collaborative Learning Task Connections handout to guide learners to make multiple connections to collaborative activities. Have students share their task connections with the rest of the class and discuss any difficulties they had in making the task connections. By framing discussions around students’ effort in making task connections, we reinforce that the process of learning and collaborating is just as important as—if not more important than—the final results.

It all comes down to motivation. While the research is pragmatic about the roles that intrinsic and extrinsic motivation play in the classroom, there’s consensus that inspiring students’ intrinsic motivation increases student effort and tolerance for persisting through challenging tasks, along with helping them develop a deeper understanding of concepts.