PhD position in Motivational Research (1.0 FTE, 4 years)

The Department of Education at Utrecht University offers a PhD position in the field of Educational Sciences, more specifically on motivational research, under the supervision of Dr. Barbara Flunger and Prof. Tamara van Gog.

Students’ lack of motivation is a major problem at all levels of education. Over the course of their school career, a significant decrease in students’ motivation has been observed in almost every academic domain (Frenzel et al., 2010; Jacobs et al., 2002). Thus, many students do not reach their full potential, because motivation is a key predictor of academic achievement (e.g., Murayama et al., 2013). Students with low motivation have a higher tendency to drop out of school or not further their education (Vallerand, Fortier, & Guay, 1997). Consequently, there is a need to identify the most effective strategy to buffer against motivational losses.

A common reflex in education is to impose external measures to boost students’ motivation, such as ‘need support’ provided by teachers (i.e., instructional styles that are aimed at promoting students’ autonomy or competence, e.g., through providing choices or guidance). Although prior motivational research has yielded substantial evidence for the beneficial effects of teachers’ need support on students’ motivation and academic outcomes, several important open questions remain, which we intend to start to address in this project. The candidate’s research can, for instance, focus on the underlying dynamics that could drive individual differences in students’ motivation (such as motivational contagion through classmates or the motivation of teachers), based on existing datasets and/or further experimental work. Moreover, because students will encounter many situations in which external need support by teachers is simply not available (e.g., during self-study), data will also be collected in experimental studies to investigate whether students would benefit from applying strategies of need support to promote their need satisfaction themselves. The candidate has the unique opportunity to co-design the exact direction and focus of this project and the studies together with the supervisors.

Responsibilities:

• conducting the research (literature research, designing the experiments, recruiting participants, pre-registering studies, collecting and analysing data, preparing and storing data packages for sharing);
• writing international scientific publications and a dissertation;
• giving presentations at (inter)national scientific conferences;
• active participation in the research team of the UU Department of Education;
• following courses/training (e.g., in the context of Research School ICO, the Interuniversity Centre for Educational Sciences and the local Graduate School);
• teaching courses or supervising Bachelor’s/Master’s thesis projects (max. 0.1 FTE) can be part of the position.