🏹 How Autonomy Produces Success
New research shows that offering choice in learning enhances educational outcomes
Self-determination theory suggests that people have three key psychological needs in relation to their sense of motivation and well-being:
Competence: feeling capable and effective
Relatedness: feeling connected to others
Autonomy: experiencing freedom and choice in how your life is unfolding
The third construct of autonomy can be impacted in many ways. When we don’t have enough money or time to do the things we want to do each day, it can erode our sense of freedom and choice. Or when we have a domineering boss, we can feel as though we’re simply doing what we’re being asked to do rather than what we feel is the right thing to do.
For university students, a lack of autonomy can be quite common, since they need to follow mandatory schedules and strict deadlines through the year that they have no control over. At certain times of year, they even need to occupy their “free time” with studying for exams that may determine their future careers and lives.
For that reason, new research has focused on assessing what happens when you give university students a stronger sense of autonomy. Since a lack of autonomy often hinders motivation, perhaps offering more choice over learning can boost motivation and consequently educational outcomes.
🎲 What happens when you give university students more autonomy?
One of the best predictors of educational success is simply student attendance. If you don’t show up to class, you won’t learn as much as the people who do, and your grades are likely to suffer as a result.
For this reason, educators often make attendance mandatory. They track each student’s attendance record and may introduce penalties for missing a certain number of classes. The problem with this approach is that it removes autonomy from the student and may therefore reduce their motivation to do well in class.
In a study published in 2024, researchers split 104 Gen-Ed philosophy students into two group types:
Mandatory attendance: these students were required to attend their classes; if they missed more than 3 classes, there was a 3% penalty on their final grade, whereas if they met the attendance threshold, they received a 3% bonus on their grade.
Optional-mandatory attendance: these students could choose at the beginning of the semester whether to commit to the mandatory attendance rules above or opt for no attendance requirement. Opting out would simply mean their attendance is not tracked and has no effect on their grade.
In the optional-mandatory attendance group, 90% of students opted for mandatory attendance. When given the choice, the vast majority of people happily embraced the more challenging and potentially rewarding option rather than going down the easier but less fruitful route.
At the end of the semester, the researchers compared the attendance rates of the mandatory group with the optional-mandatory group.
While attendance rates were similar at the start of the semester, they declined over the course of the semester for the mandatory group but remained steady for the optional-mandatory group. In other words, opting into a mandatory attendance program motivated students to attend class consistently, despite them having the same risks/rewards as the students who were forced into mandatory attendance.
In a second experiment, the researchers split 114 introductory philosophy students into two cohorts (both groups were at the same institution with the same professor):
Mandatory tasks: students in this group had to complete 20 challenging argument analysis problems.
Free-to-switch tasks: students in this group could choose between the problem-solving tasks above or easier essay-based tasks, and they could switch at any time.
Similar to the first experiment, students in the second group with more autonomy overwhelmingly opted to pursue the more difficult tasks. 90% of them chose the problem-solving tasks and only 5% of those people later switched to the easier tasks.
More importantly, students in the free-to-switch group spent significantly more time on homework assignments than students in the mandatory group did.
Final grades also showed an interesting pattern. Students in the mandatory group did not significantly improve their grades over time with each homework assignment, but students in the free-to-switch group improved substantially. With each additional assignment, a free-to-switch student’s chances of getting the top grade increased by 16% more than a mandatory student’s chances.
Choice and autonomy are essential for motivation throughout life. Well-meaning interventions in work and education will often try to force people to make the right decision, but this can be counterproductive if it diminishes a person’s sense of autonomy. When people feel as though they have freely chosen a particular challenge, they are more committed to it, more motivated by it, and less likely to drop out of it.
⭐️ Takeaway tips
#1. Make your tasks your own
In an ideal world, we have high autonomy in all of our decisions and can follow our passions every second of the day. In reality, there are many tradeoffs and compromises to make. Even when other people are setting tasks and priorities for you in your work, life, or education, it’s important to identify why those tasks matter to you personally. Take ownership of the tasks you need to complete, and find alignment between those tasks and your personal values or ambitions.
#2. Feel driven by your own incentives
It’s common to relate our personal performance to external pressures. For example, we might be working hard to avoid losing our job, or we might be exercising so other people like the way we look. These kinds of pressures rarely keep us motivated for long, and performance eventually becomes a slog. For each of our goals in life, it’s important to keep track of more self-relevant motivations or rewards. Perhaps we can work hard to improve our skills and knowledge, or perhaps we can exercise to keep our bodies healthy and energized.
#3. Encourage autonomy in others around you
While creating more autonomy in our own lives, we can also encourage the same in others. If you’re someone’s manager, you can look for opportunities to let them set their own tasks or priorities each day. If your friend seems to be constantly rushing around to do things for others, maybe you can encourage them to make more time for themselves. In the mayhem of daily life, it’s easy to lose track of why freedom and autonomy really matter, but we can help each other to find ourselves within that chaos.
“It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion. It is easy in solitude to live after our own. But the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson