The Evidence Behind The Will to Learn

Dear colleague,

Recently, our fellow educator Ryan Hubbard in California wrote in to DSJ headquarters with the following comments and question:

You say [in this article] that “student motivation multiplies a given lesson's impact like nothing else.” I completely agree and know that your philosophies are always supported by thorough research. Do you have any sources of research that point to that specific idea? As our students continue to show little growth on state tests, our admin is doubling down on priority standards and increasing lesson rigor. Those moves are important, but even the perfect, focused, rigorous lesson will fall flat with a group of under motivated 8th graders. I would love to have some specific research that I can share with district leaders to help plead the motivation case.

Much to my dismay, I've not written in a long time on the comprehensive research-based rationale for the Five Key Beliefs methodology. I do a lot of work in The Will to Learn explaining the HOW of this methodology and much of the philosophical WHY for it, but I don't spend enough time unpacking the years of research that led to it.

I'd like to remedy that in this article. To begin, let me share the remarkable results of Grand River Prep HS, a high school in Kentwood, MI, that's been integrating the Five Key Beliefs methodology for the past year (we're currently in year two of a PD partnership).

The Remarkable Case of Grand River Prep HS

GRP reached out to me in the spring of 2024. Their leadership team had read The Will to Learn, heard my keynote on the topic, and developed an interest in my assistance in bringing the methodology of the book down into the DNA of their faculty.

The results from the first year of the partnership were remarkable, and I want to be clear before showing them that 95% of these results are to be attributed to excellent, relentless leadership of the team (comprised of not just admin but also teacher-leaders) and the crystal clarity the team had taken to hiring like-hearted teachers and casting vision for several years prior to my arrival.

So here's what happened in terms of the hard data of test scores, which I'm suggesting are correlated to the timing of their Five Key Beliefs integration work.

SAT Improvement

During the prior few years, the team at GRP had been tirelessly working to find ways to close the gap between their school’s SAT scores and the state's. They were 15-20 points lower, then 10 points lower, and in Spring 2025, they finally beat the state.

The momentum was there prior to their Will to Learn implementation, but they did one thing that was very special that I believe helped them get to their goal this past year: they focused on three strategically-chosen Will to Learn strategies (tracking attempted moments of genuine connection (MGCs), mini-sermons, and Woodenization) as PD focuses for the year.

AP Pass Rate Improvement

Their AP data is even more impressive because at GRP, all students are required to participate in AP classes during their high school career. (This high expectation for all students is part of what intrigued me about their school.)

Take a look at the trends below.

There's a LOT to unpack in both of these data points (causation versus correlation; isolating variables) so I'm not showing those to you to convince you The Will to Learn is the magical silver bullet (it's not, because there's no such thing). Rather, I'm showing you because The Will to Learn is a reliable and accessible methodology for moving toward the kinds of goals most secondary schools have.

Now…. let's look at WHY I say that. The source is not school-level data.

How the Educational Research Explains the Epic Results of a Focused and Strong Will to Learn Implementation

All of my work has a beguiling simplicity to it. It's so simple that it appears dumb. “We already do this,” I hear folks say. And to this I agree — many of us do do the things I recommend in The Will to Learn. The problem I'm trying to remedy is that we don't do the things I describe in the book with the frequency and intentionality and awareness and intelligence that they merit. I am extremely confident that, with just the 10 strategies in The Will to Learn plus nothing else, I can be world class at creating an environment in which all students grow in their care for the work of learning.

But why? Where does my confidence come from? Is it just the anecdotal evidence of my classroom? One-off case studies like the Grand River Prep data above?

No. It comes from the two most important collections of research I've encountered in my career: John Hattie's Visible Learning work (e.g., as described in Hattie et al.'s recent illustrated guidebook) and Camille Farrington's critical literature review Teaching Adolescents to Become Learners.

The Evidence From Hattie

The only thing wrong with John Hattie's career-long, herculean meta-analysis is that it's too good. Visible Learning is way too good. It represents the largest scale analysis of educational research ever conducted — insanely large, as in 130,000 studies are represented in it, involving more than 400,000,000 students from around the world.

Can we pause and process that, colleague? It is insanely large.

And then, the genius touch: he boils all that meta-analysis down to a list of several hundred factors and their demonstrated effect size on a learner's outcomes. And this often leads schools and leaders and teachers to pick and choose from the things with the biggest effect sizes.

And THAT'S where teachers start to have problems with Hattie.

The problem with pick-and-choose approaches to Visible Learning is that they are incoherent to us teachers. The factors that comprise Hattie's list aren't apps you install on your phone; they are each inextricably interconnected with dozens of other factors on the list. The Will to Learn is basically a book that asks, “What if you came up with an approach to leveraging some of the most powerful things in Visible Learning and framed it in accessible, teacher-friendly language — by a practicing teacher, for practicing teachers?”

So how does The Will to Learn align with Visible Learning? Let's take a look at some of Hattie's factors and their effect sizes. (For clarity, an effect size of .4 = average; anything above = better than average/good, and anything below = below average/not good. More explanation in the image below.)

• Teacher Credibility = 1.09 effect size. This one's a whopper. And that's one of the reasons it's the base of the Five Key Beliefs pyramid.
• Students feeling disliked by teachers = -.26 effect size. Tracking attempted moments of genuine connection (MGCs) is remarkably efficient and effective at avoiding this problem or fixing it when it shows up.
• Boredom = -.46 effect size. Boredom is partly a teaching issue but largely a Value belief issue. This is part of why some folks can be highly intrigued by an hours-long documentary and others will be completely bored by it.
• Decrease disruptive behaviors = .82 effect size. Disruptive behaviors are often a byproduct of students not caring about the work of learning in a given class. All 10 strategies in The Will to Learn help remedy this.
• Student expectations = 1.23 effect size. Anything we do to cultivate the Five Key Beliefs is essentially aimed at creating positive student expectations for our class.
• Teacher expectations are high for all students = .9 effect size. Having high expectations for students is shown rather than told throughout the pages of The Will to Learn.
• Classroom cohesion = .66 effect size. Strategies like Normalize Struggle (#10 in The Will to Learn) create cohesion. Environments that are Five-Key-Beliefs conducive = naturally cohesive environments.
• Teacher-student relationships = .62 effect size. This is one of the many happy side effects of getting good at MGCs (Strategy #1 in The Will to Learn).
• Teacher clarity = .85 effect size. Again, this is woven through the book.
• Intrinsic motivation = .47 effect size. This is what the book is about.
• Help-seeking = .73 effect size. This improves alongside the Five Key Beliefs.
• Teaching students to drive their learning = .96 effect size. This is what Woodenization does (Strategy #7 in The Will to Learn).
• Self-efficacy = .64 effect size. This is one of the Five Key Beliefs.
• Collective efficacy = 1.34 effect size. The methodology in The Will to Learn produces this without talking about it. (It kind of drives me crazy when people act like collective efficacy is something that comes from just talking about collective efficacy. It does not. Efficacy comes from four basic things.)

I could find more, colleague. That's not a “flex” but is rather a stern and earnest confidence. I would never recommend something to you in a book just because I want you to do what I say. My work has always been aimed at helping, and it's irresponsible to recommend folks do things that aren't heavily supported by evidence. The Will to Learn is what happens when you take something amazing like Visible Learning and meditate on it and learn what the different things mean and all the while try to teach from a clear and coherent and “what would this look like if it were simple?” place.

The Evidence From Farrington

Farrington et al., under the auspices of the Chicago Consortium on School Research (CCSR), wrote a critical literature review in the 2010s that changed my career. It was in that report I first saw the Value, Effort, Efficacy, and Belonging beliefs (the researchers called them “academic mindsets”) treated as a group. To avoid writing a blog article as long as their report, I'll just share some bullet points about what this report taught me about the research behind each of these beliefs. You can find detailed treatments of the evidence within the report itself (linked at the start of this paragraph).

Regarding the Value Belief

• CCSR research identifies “This work has value for me” as one of four critical academic mindsets that strongly influence academic perseverance and improve academic behaviors.
• Research by Hulleman and Harackiewicz (2009) found that students who wrote about how science topics applied to their lives saw 0.80 grade point improvements — demonstrating the power of value cultivation.
  • This is the utility-value t-chart intervention I feature in Strategy #6 of The Will to Learn.
• Studies show that when students value academic work, they are much more likely to use metacognitive strategies and persist at difficult tasks (Pintrich & DeGroot, 1990).
• One of the biggest things this report introduced me to is expectancy-value theory, which basically asserts that students' valuation of academic tasks strongly influences their choice, persistence, and performance at those tasks. This is why I've argued that the Value belief is so foundational to motivation.

Regarding the Effort Belief

• Extensive research supports the Effort belief through growth mindset studies. Blackwell, Trzesniewski, & Dweck (2007) found that seventh graders who learned that intelligence is changeable saw 0.30 grade point improvements while control groups continued to decline.
• The CCSR research emphasizes that believing ability and competence grow with effort is associated with effort attributions and better school performance.
• Studies consistently show that beliefs about intelligence and attributions for success are more strongly associated with school performance than actual measured ability.
• Basically, the report unpacks how the research clearly demonstrates that students are more likely to display academic perseverance when they have positive academic mindsets about effort. Hence the inclusion of the Effort belief in the Five Key Beliefs.

Regarding the Efficacy Belief

• Decades of research support the Efficacy belief. Bandura's foundational work shows that people's efficacy beliefs are positively associated with how long they will persevere at tasks and their likelihood to bounce back from adversity.
• CCSR findings confirm that when students believe they can succeed, they are much more likely to try hard and persevere in completing academic tasks.
• Research shows efficacy beliefs mediate the effect of skills and other beliefs on performance through their impact on effort, persistence, and perseverance.

Regarding the Belonging Belief

• Extensive research validates the Belonging belief. Osterman's (2000) comprehensive review found that belongingness is associated with higher levels of intrinsic motivation, stronger sense of identity, and willingness to adopt established norms.
• Walton and Cohen's (2011) belonging interventions with African American college students resulted in 0.24 grade point improvements sustained through senior year and reduced the racial achievement gap by 52%.
• Research consistently shows that rejection or exclusion is associated with behavioral problems, lower interest in school, lower achievement, and dropout.
• The CCSR research extensively documents how belonging uncertainty particularly affects minority students through stereotype threat, supporting my attention in The Will to Learn‘s Belonging section on identity and fit.

In Sum

If you're ever having a hard time making the case for a serious and sustained focus on student motivation in your setting, I hope this beast* of an article helps; if this article isn't enough, Hattie's work is found all over the web now and Farrington et al.'s report is freely available here.

Student motivation is NOT just a feel-good topic. It's NOT a thing to touch on and move ahead to fancier things.

It is fundamental.

Teaching right beside you,

DSJR

*P.S. My apologies for the beastly length, colleague. Back to school season means I didn't have time to make it shorter.