What is the best way to motivate students in your subject?

Motivation is a complicated beast. Traditionally broken into intrinsic and extrinsic types, students may be motivated by a whole host of competing and intertwined factors. The academic literature varies widely on these definitional terms and how they are measured (Garon-Carier, 2015; see also Didau and Rose, 2016). This is further confounded by a gap between what people believe and what they actually do. For example, a recent and ongoing study into student attitudes to science education found that many students think that science is important and valuable, but do not wish to study it themselves (DeWitt, 2017). Schools and teachers insert themselves into this cacophonous mix with often confusing and unpredictable results. For instance, a recent large-scale study of attendance interventions found that in schools where students were awarded for 100 per cent attendance, the attendance actually worsened over time. The researchers posit that social pressures (nobody wants to be ‘that’