Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Medical Education
Date Submitted: Jul 10, 2024
Date Accepted: Mar 6, 2025
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Motivation theories and constructs in experimental studies of online instruction: A systematic review and directed content analysis
ABSTRACT
Background:
Educators’ choices about how to design online instruction can influence learners’ motivation. To optimize learners’ motivation, educators must be capable of using effective motivational design strategies that target a breadth of motivational constructs (e.g., interest, confidence).
Objective:
This systematic review and directed content analysis aimed to catalogue the motivational constructs that researchers have targeted in their experimental comparison studies of motivational design strategies for online instruction in health professions education. The authors sought to identify motivational constructs that have received attention in the field and those that are presently understudied, and thus should be the focus of future studies.
Methods:
Medline, Embase, Emcare, PsychINFO, ERIC, and Web of Science were searched from 1990 to August 2022. Studies were included if they compared online instructional design strategies intending to support a motivational construct (e.g., interest) or motivation in general, among learners in licensed health professions. Two team members independently screened and coded studies regarding the motivational theories that researchers used to inform their studies and the motivational constructs they targeted with their design strategies.
Results:
From 10,584 records, 46 studies were included. Researchers tested motivational design strategies intended to make instruction more interesting, enjoyable, and fun (n = 23) far more than they tested motivational designs intended to support extrinsic value (n = 9), confidence (n = 6), social connectedness (n = 4), or autonomy (n = 2). A focus on intrinsic value beliefs appeared to be driven by studies that were not informed by any theory of motivation.
Conclusions:
Researchers in health professions education have primarily focused on motivating learners by making online instruction more interesting, enjoyable, and fun. We recommend that future research investigate motivational design strategies targeting other high-yield motivational constructs such as purpose, confidence, and autonomy. Such research would help to generate a broader tool-kit of strategies for educators to draw on to support learners’ motivation in online settings. Clinical Trial: PROSPERO registration number: #CRD42022359521
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.