Learning Theory ARCS Model of Motivational Design

The ARCS Model of Motivational Design is a popular instructional design model, first developed by John Keller, Ph.D., an educational psychologist in 1979. The ARCS model aims to break down learner motivation into 4 parts: Attention, Relevance, Confidence, and Satisfaction. It's important to note that this model focuses on extrinsic motivational factors that an instructor can control in some way in the hopes of activating intrinsic motivational factors on the part of learners.

Attention

The first part of the model is the idea that it is important to gain the attention of the learner in some meaningful way to prepare them for learning. This can be done in one of two ways: (1) perceptual arousal, in other words using some sort of surprise to gain interest; or (2) inquiry arousal - piquing curiosity in the learner by asking some sort of challenging question or presenting an intellectual problem to be solved.

Relevance

The second part of the model is the idea that relevance must be established for the thing about to be taught in order to motivate the learner to want to learn it. The learner must see, directly, how what they are about to learn will prove useful in some way to them.

This can be done in a number of ways. An instructor can be up front and tell the learners how learning a new skill extends or enhances a skill they already have or how it will be relevant in either their current or future jobs. In certain cases, where the topic is rather large, an instructor may opt to have the learners choose which part of the topic they want to focus on, thus allowing the learner to select what is most relevant to them.

Confidence

The confidence part of ARCS is all about helping the student gain the confidence that they have a high likelihood of success of meeting the objectives. If something seems to difficult to learn, learners may feel that they cannot meet the objectives, and their motivation to learn the new skill will decrease - they may not even try at all.

To help motivation in this area, it's really important that students are given any objectives and prerequisites up front and that they are made known of any evaluative criteria (exams and projects) related to the subject matter. It also helps break larger skills and tasks up into smaller pieces - this is one of the reasons why instructional designers often emphasize the importance of chunking content appropriately, so that all of these smaller, more achievable steps lead to the overall larger instructional objective. Again, it also might be good to give learners some measure of control and choice in what they're learning, depending on the topic, so they can opt to focus on aspects they feel more confident in first. And, finally, feedback is critical here. If students don't feel they have the support of their instructors when learning something, confidence can quickly erode.

Satisfaction

Finally, learning must be rewarding or satisfying in some way to trill motivate someone to learn something. This can be in the form of praise from the instructor, entertainment, or some sort of sense of achievement.

Again, feedback is important here. While it is important to correct learners, it's perhaps even more important to let learners know when they are doing something correct, reinforce that, and offer appropriate praise for a good job done. However, there's a balance here, because you also don't want to insult someone by over-rewarding praise for especially easy tasks. It's also a good idea to allow a learner to practice a new skill or apply new knowledge in as close to a real-world setting as possible in order to demonstrate to the learner that what they've learned is useful to them.

More information

For more information on Keller's ARCS model, please check out some of the following resources:

ARCSModel.com
ARCS: A Conversation with John Keller (YouTube)
Interview with John Keller (YouTube)
Development and Use of the ARCS Model of Instructional Design (one of Keller's earlier papers on the subject)