Abstract
Rural schools face the challenges of motivating and retaining students, often in the face of severe resource constraints. This paper synthesizes fifteen years of the author’s rural research on secondary students’ school-related motivation, distilling it into strategic principles for rural teachers and administrators. Effective motivational knowledge and strategies supported by both theory and research can help school staff fill the gap between potential and actual student achievement. Multi-level strategies for motivating individuals and groups include elements of classroom instructional practice, interpersonal relationships, and the broader school motivational climate including policy. By motivating students effectively, teachers and administrators can bridge the gap between what students do achieve and what they could achieve.
Highlights
Whenever we address rural needs, we must explicitly define what we mean by “rural” (Hardré & Hennessey, 2010)
The body of work synthesized in this paper studied the motivational environment and dynamic in US rural secondary schools
When asked about what hampers student motivation, many rural teachers point to home problems, and the resource and social deficits that are common in many rural places (Hardré, 2010; Hardré & Sullivan, 2009). Teachers seeing these negative influences frequently use a climate of interpersonal support and relatedness at school, to compensate for a lack of motivational support for education coming from parents and the larger community context
Summary
Rural schools face the challenges of motivating and retaining students, often in the face of severe resource constraints. A gap remains between what rural students are doing, learning and achieving, and what their teachers believe they could achieve with adequate educational motivation (Hardré & Sullivan, 2009) Their lack of motivation leads to disengagement and dropout from school and educational pursuits, a pervasive issue, more prevalent in rural than in nonrural schools (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2007). The body of work synthesized in this paper studied the motivational environment and dynamic in US rural secondary schools These schools were defined as rural based primarily on their geographic location in small communities (low population density), remote from large metropolitan areas (geographic isolation), where the local industry was tied to place (largely agriculture/place-based economy). This profile of rural communities and schools is consistent with federal and state data for these areas (Brown & Swanson, 2003)
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