INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ENGINEERING AND PRODUCT DESIGN EDUCATION 4 & 5 SEPTEMBER 2014, UNIVERSITY OF TWENTE, THE NETHERLANDS ENHANCING STUDENT MOTIVATION – ‘RAISE THE BAR’ Anders HÅKANSSON and Peter TÖRLIND Division of Innovation & Design, Luleå University of Technology, Sweden ABSTRACT The quest for enhancing student motivation, commitment and performance in higher education is an ever-present struggle for university teachers. Of course, the hunt for a good grade is something that is very central for students, but as a teacher you would like to reach further and find a deeper, more personal motivation within each student. A hypothesis that was investigated was that students will accept high demands if they are clearly defined and presented directly in the beginning instead of being introduced gradually during the course. In the present course, a team of six teachers was put together in order to be able to handle the students’ need for coaching and support. The course included multiple sub-deadlines concluded by status presentations, called Design Reviews, where the groups updated the teaching team and other groups on the project’s progress. The Design Reviews included both an oral presentation of five minutes and a written memorandum, called PM. Each student was responsible for one oral presentation and one PM. Examination of the course was based on the final project result as well as on performance during the Design Reviews. The conclusions from this approach are that the general motivation was increased. The project results were very good and included several innovative solutions. Student reaction to the high demands was positive but teacher coaching is a very important factor for keeping this on a manageable and stimulating level for the students and preventing it from being an oppressive stress factor. Keywords: Motivation, commitment, coaching, expectations 1 INTRODUCTION This paper describes a study made to investigate how raised demands/challenges and more formalized coaching would affect student motivation. Felder and Brent [1] argue that a necessary condition for students’ intellectual growth is challenge; however, this challenge should be adapted to their current development level. The study took place during a project course for the third-year students at the Industrial Design Engineering program at Luleå University of Technology, Sweden. The quest for enhancing student motivation, commitment and performance in higher education is an ever-present struggle for university teachers. Teachers constantly develop means to try to bring out the full capacity of the student. Motivation is a substantial subject, and researchers seem to agree on three basic aspects of human behaviour involved with motivation: to choose a particular action, to persist with that action, and to put effort into that action [2]. This implies that, in order to facilitate this theory, the goals and purposes are made clear to the students (and adapted to the students’ current development level) or, rather, that the students identify the goals and purposes. One must understand that students in most cases carry more than one goal and that these goals interact, both positively and negatively, in each given situation [3]. It is therefore important to place the course goal in question in a context meaningful to the student. It is also of great importance to understand the students’ underlying goals in order for a teacher to provide the most effective coaching. Research has shown that informal contact between students and faculty can influence student persistence positively [4], [5], [6]. Kolić-Vehovec et al. [7] identify four different types of goal orientation among university students and the learning strategies among these four types differ regarding goal orientation, perceived effort engaged, reading strategy, and the like. Placing different types of goal-oriented students in the same project group implies conflicts and difficulties to cooperate within the group. Taylor et al. [8] emphasise that to that successful learning experiences for capstone design teams require faculty to shift their role from a traditional lecture or consulting role to a coaching role. Coaching has been used