Chapter 6: Motivating Assessment: How to Leverage Summative Assessments for the Good of Intrinsic Motivation

Many teachers, parents, and administrators believe that students should be motivated to perform well on assessments and that good performance on assessments should, in turn, increase future motivation (Wise & Smith, 2016). However, most people can easily think of a time when this simple positive association was anything but the reality and, instead, students were riddled with test anxiety about low performance or disinterested in content despite their high test scores (Earl, 2013; Wise & Smith, 2016). This inconsistent effect may be rooted in an oversight of researchers and teachers-educators to integrate contemporary perspectives on assessment and motivation in a way that can predictably benefit students. In other words, because researchers and teacher-educators tend not to combine contemporary perspectives on both assessment and motivation, teachers have few opportunities to think about how their assessment practices impact motivation and vice versa. The purpose of this chapter is to carve out space for teachers to intentionally consider the interrelated nuances of summative assessment and intrinsic motivation. Within this, our goal is to equip teachers with an integrative understanding of assessment and motivation. We begin by explaining contemporary perspectives on assessment and motivation separately. Then we describe ways in which these contemporary perspectives on assessment and motivation have been combined in empirical research, instructional materials, and theoretical frameworks. We conclude by suggesting ways teacher educators can show their students how to intentionally leverage summative assessments, from design through communication of results, to better support students’ intrinsic motivation.