March 21, 2025 | By Elizabeth Ganga
Tony Perez is a professor in the Department of STEM Education and Professional Studies at Old Dominion University in Virginia and director of the university’s Motivation, Identity, and Learning Lab (MilLab). In his work, Perez focuses on how STEM instructors can support adaptive, positive forms of motivation by shifting away from a competitive, performance-focused classroom environment to one that provides various social supports and underscores the personal value and relevance of STEM courses. As part of the Collaborative’s effort to learn from other researchers focused on key elements of self-directed learning, CCRC’s Elizabeth Ganga and Collaborative Student Fellow Mason Gallagher spoke with Perez about creating classroom environments that support students’ motivation and identity as STEM majors—especially students who are underrepresented in STEM—and their career success.
This interview was condensed and edited.
Elizabeth Ganga: How do you think about the role of motivation in learning? There’s kind of a common-sense part of it, but what’s the academic way of looking at motivation and learning?
Tony Perez: I think you’re correct that there is the common-sense part of it, which is that motivation is what moves us to do things. Without some kind of motivation, in particular academic motivation, students won’t engage in learning. But I think what’s also important is the quality of one’s motivation. The more intrinsically motivated or the more autonomously motivated I am, the better engagement I’ll have with that learning, so I’ll engage in higher quality learning practices.
Ganga: What’s the importance of motivation for underserved students?
Perez: I think the general principles are the same, regardless of who you’re talking about. However, sometimes in research you see differences in motivation. For example, women are underrepresented in some STEM disciplines, particularly the physical sciences, engineering, and math disciplines. And you’ll see that women will perform as well as men or better in their courses, but they’ll feel less confident—and one component of one’s motivation is their confidence that they can succeed. So, it’s critical to support students from underserved populations because the environment may not fully support everyone’s motivation.
Ganga: How do you think about designing learning environments that support motivation?
Perez: At my institution, I have a Provost’s Fellowship for academic success where I’m trying to help the institution reduce the numbers of Ds, Fs, withdrawals, and incompletes in courses that have high rates of those. The way I think about it is that we can set the conditions to support adaptive motivation, meaning supporting students’ confidence that they can succeed, value for what they’re learning, and focus on learning. There are several ways to do that, and they include how faculty in a class provide feedback to students. Is it supportive feedback that identifies strengths and also where students can improve? Or are students just receiving a grade or seeing where they fall on a curve of grades in the course, which may be less supportive of student motivation? Also, things like supporting student belonging: Making sure students are feeling like they belong in a particular major, for example, is really critical. Another example is finding ways to connect the courses they’re taking for their major to something that’s relevant and important to them. It could be their career, but it could also be to their community or to other interests they have.
Ganga: Are you also studying some of these interventions?
Perez: There’s lots of great work on relevance interventions, where students will write about why what they’re learning is important to them. And that kind of work has produced some really interesting results in terms of student achievement.
Some of the work that I’ve done specifically is related to reducing perceptions of cost, like the time and effort that it takes to be successful, or the stress that might come with a particular course or being in a particular major. I’ve implemented interventions related to reducing perceptions of cost or reframing costs as a normal part of the learning process. And then there are also interventions which I’ve engaged with that take a more holistic kind of approach, so targeting multiple forms of motivation. Another similar kind of holistic approach that I’ve been a part of with some colleagues is addressing both motivation and learning and self-regulation. And the work that we did demonstrated that addressing both of those was more powerful than addressing learning or motivation by itself. I think all of that kind of research is really important, but I get really excited about the more holistic kinds of approaches.
Ganga: That’s really interesting because that’s what the Collaborative is trying to do. We’re putting together an instructional model that addresses motivation, metacognition, and applied learning skills in one package.
Perez: I feel like it’s a really important direction of research in motivation and self-regulation: combining the two of those and creating environments that support students’ motivation and self-regulation and also help them develop those skills. I think self-directed learning is a skill that students can learn, and I also think developing motivation regulation is a skill that students can learn.
Mason Gallagher: Can you provide any specific examples of learning environments or interventions that you’ve helped design?
Perez: I would say the main one that comes to mind is what I call the mitigating-cost intervention. Perceptions of cost can impact the overall value that a student sees in some learning task. If they see something as more costly, that might be a deciding factor in deciding to switch majors or leave college. So, I wanted to develop an intervention that would help students understand that experiencing struggle in the learning process is not atypical—it’s normal.
We developed an intervention where we interviewed upperclassmen of different genders and racial and ethnic backgrounds so that students could see someone like them in the videos that we created. Students were able to view and hear upperclassmen’s stories about the struggles they had and then, ultimately, their success. And we found that the intervention, coupled with a learning intervention, supported their achievement in their particular classes.
And then we followed up our prior study with a test of an intervention where undergraduates read a vignette from a junior or senior role model. I, along with some of my students, explicitly matched the students, and we compared how being matched to someone based on race and gender impacted the effectiveness of the intervention relative to a group that was not matched based on race and gender. And we found that Black students closed the gap in their STEM grades. Follow-up interviews revealed that Black women in particular really appreciated seeing someone like them who was successful. Seeing someone like them succeed, I think, helped them feel like they could perhaps succeed as well.
Ganga: Have you looked at any of this in an online setting?
Perez: I’ve not done much work personally in that area. But it’s definitely a burgeoning area of interest of mine because these issues of motivation, self-regulation, or self-directed learning are particularly important in online settings because there is so much more independent work that students typically have to do.
Ganga: What have you learned about how to support faculty in implementing these kinds of interventions?
Perez: I think working with faculty is critical because where I think we’ll really make gains in supporting students is less by external interventions where students get some video or some exercise that researchers come in and apply. We can make more progress by working with faculty to structure their learning environments so that they’re supportive of their students’ motivation and self-regulation.
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