Suboptimization of Motivation Approaches in Engineering Education

Engineers of the 21 st century will be called upon to work and learn in ways their predecessors never experienced.They will face novel, ambiguous, complex problems that will require adaptability, innovation, and leadership.To meet the challenges their students will face in the future, engineering universities need new approaches and structures to motivate their future graduates.The use of extrinsic (rather than intrinsic) motivation to prod student learning is virtually ubiquitous in engineering universities.This paper provides an overview of research that has been done on performance and motivation, and develops a model of student motivation based on that literature.The main contribution of this paper is a theoretical model of the relationship between types of motivation and performance.It proposes that attempts to optimize student learning has resulted in sub-optimization due to local optima and unexplored search spaces.It proposes a re-structuring of engineering education to meet the challenges of preparing 21 st century engineers.