Debunked notions of education where teachers pour knowledge into students’ brains (e.g., listen and repeat what the teacher says), have been replaced with models that get a better balance between teacher input and student agency.

Recent research focusing on the latter reveals that students’ learning significantly advances through their own volitional effort investment, creating new mental schemas and building up their long-term memory.

This is analogous to the importance of investing physical effort in the gym, actively stressing muscles which in turn causes the reinforcement and development of muscle fibres.

What is effort?

Effort is a term that is used ubiquitously in education but rarely defined. It is generally understood that academic effort is not only an important means to an end, but also an important end in itself.

Until now though, effort appears to have been hiding in plain sight as a potent area of potential research but without sufficient attention being given to it. Our research makes an important first step in addressing this gap.

We have shown that academic effort can be thought of as consisting of three dimensions: operative, cognitive, and social-emotional, as can be seen in Figure 1. 

  • Operative effort is the action-based energy students apply to the production of academic output (e.g., schoolwork, homework)
  • Cognitive effort is the brain-based energy students invest in their mental concentration and focus in class and at home
  • Social-emotional effort is the person-based energy students apply to their classroom interactions with peers and teachers (e.g., socially responsible behaviour that supports a positive learning environment). 

Figure 1. The Three Dimensions of Academic Effort (adapted from Nagy, Martin, and Collie, 2022)

These three dimensions of effort manifest in a multitude of ways for different students and different classroom settings. 

  • Operative effort in a mathematics class may involve solving equations by carefully setting out work in an exemplar manner (e.g., equal signs lined up underneath each other, making the operations being applied to each side of the equation explicit on each line, with answers underlined); while operative effort in a drama class may involve a student responding to critical feedback about their performance (e.g., deliberately trying to project their voice to the back of the audience, deliberate practice on difficult passages in a soliloquy, incorporating actions that emphasise and reinforce specific aspects of a speech). 
  • Cognitive effort in a science class may involve classroom focus and concentration and reflection of the conceptual aspects of a new topic (e.g., manifesting as diverse observable indicators for different students such as non-verbal affirmative body language); while cognitive effort in a foreign language class may involve efforts to remember vocabulary (e.g., memorising a list of specific words for a homework assignment).
  • Social-emotional effort in a history class may involve actively encouraging others to participate in a group (e.g., supporting others’ contributions, urging group members to wait their turn, encouraging quieter members of the group to offer their suggestions and participate); while social-emotional effort in a music class may involve understanding one’s role in a group collaboration (e.g., a student carefully listening to the dynamics of a band and adjusting the volume of their instrument to appropriately blend in with the ensemble).

Supporting students’ effort

Understanding the tripartite nature of academic effort allows teachers to focus on strategies that target each of these three specific effort dimensions.

Teachers can encourage students to invest operative effort by:

  • Holding them to account on homework and classwork deadlines,
  • Emphasising the importance of active investment of a student’s time and energy in the quality completion of required academic tasks,
  • Appropriately scaffolding tasks for some students and giving more task-autonomy for others,
  • Acknowledging and recognising a student’s effortful investment in their academic output (not just focusing on the correctness of their work), and
  • Directing operative effort toward strategies that will improve and cement learning.

Teachers can promote cognitive effort in the classroom by:

  • Allowing students sufficient time to think and reflect on new information or concepts that are presented (sometimes called “think time” or “wait time”) before encouraging students to respond to questions on this new information,
  • Explicitly encouraging students to develop and exhibit active listening skills (e.g., emphasising the importance of students’ eye-contact with the teacher, or attending to the whiteboard), and
  • Asking thought-provoking questions that can support students’ cognitive effort investment by encouraging deeper conceptual thinking as well as clear articulation of students’ comprehension and understanding.

For social-emotional effort, teachers can look to:

  • Develop clear social and behavioural expectations of students to foster and promote positive, safe, and supportive interactions between students, engendering a sense of belonging,
  • Have one-on-one conversations with individual students that reinforce their specific efforts to contribute to a respectful and academically conducive classroom environment,
  • Encourage a student’s support and interest in others’ contributions and participation in class,
  • Support a student’s management of impulsivity and proactive self-regulation among other students in the class, and
  • Acknowledge contributions that promote or support other students’ learning.

In sum

Effort is not only important for academic growth, but an important educational outcome in itself.

It is critical that teachers understand the multidimensional nature of effort (with specific operative, cognitive, and social-emotional components) to best encourage and direct students’ effortful investment in their learning. 

Further Reading:

1. Nagy, R. P., Martin, A. J., & Collie, R. J. (2023). It’s time to measure students’ effort at school. In ‘Education Review’, January 31, https://www.educationreview.com.au/2023/01/its-time-to-measure-students-effort-at-school-opinion

2. Nagy, R. P. (2017). Tracking and visualising student effort: A practical analytics tool for student engagement. In L. Rosman (Ed.), Excellence in professional practice conference 2017: Case studies of practice (pp. 53–62). Australian Council for Educational Research. https://www.acer.org/files/EPPC_Case_Study_Digital.pdf

3. Nagy, R. P. (2016). Tracking and visualizing student effort: Evolution of a practical analytics tool for staff and student engagement. Journal of Learning Analytics, 3(2), 165–193. https://doi.org/10.18608/jla.2016.32.8.

4. Nagy, R. P. (2024). The Role of Effort in High School Students’ Academic Development: A Longitudinal Perspective in Mathematics and English [Doctoral dissertation, University of New South Wales]. UNSW Works. http://dx.doi.org/10.26190/unsworks/30422

5. Nagy, R. P., Martin, A. J., & Collie, R. J. (2022). Disentangling motivation and engagement: Exploring the role of effort in promoting greater conceptual and methodological clarity. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, Article 1045717. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1045717 also published in Frontiers Research Topics Series, https://doi.org/10.3389/978-2-8325-3437-3