Are you currently fed up with the attitude that the students exhibit against homework? Are you trying out different ways to correct it but to no avail? Want to find out ways to motivate your students so that they take their civil engineering assignments a bit more seriously? Well, it is indeed true that a teacher plays a big role in the student’s life and how the students perceive their homework and their education is based on their teacher as well.
A student of civil engineering will be reluctant to do any work initially. Thus, it depends on the teacher to make it more interesting and make them more involved in the work and make them enjoy their studies as well.
Civil engineering, no doubt, is a difficult course and involves a lot of work. It involves a lot of practical work as well which the students need to be aware of and has to do their background research for in order to do well in it.
However, oftentimes, students are reluctant to work on this subject because it bores them and because of the amount of time they have to invest in it.
They turn up for class without completing their assignments or simply skip the class for the day. It falls upon the teacher to motivate the students enough so that they are interested in working on their assignments and in the process, learn as well.
How to motivate students?
Thus, it becomes crucial for the teachers to make the course of civil engineering interesting and find out ways to make the students more vested in the subject. However, this is much easier said than done.
Students, at this level, are much harder to motivate and you need to find out creative ways to catch their attention. So, go ahead and take a look at the list below in order to get an idea and develop creative ways to motivate the students to take an interest in their assignments.
“Be stubborn about your goals and flexible about your methods.”
- Appeal to their interest
One way to motivate your students, and make them take an interest in the course is by finding out what appeals to them. Find out exactly what their goals are, what they want to achieve and how they want to achieve. Also, find out what interests them. Is it the electronic medium? Or is it the visual or audio media? Find out the class preference and build your assignment accordingly in order to cater to their interests.
If they are more comfortable with audio and visual medium, then ask them to create presentations on a particular topic in civil engineering, let say on the soil structure, as an assignment.
This will make them a bit more interested in studying and they will learn something along the way as well.
- Be objective
When handing out instructions to students about the assignment, it is essential that you be objective. If the instructions are long, the students will feel less inclined to read through the entire thing and hence, even reluctant to sit down and work on it.
Ensure that the duration required to work upon it doesn’t exceed the mark. Traditionally, a student should take an hour to work on a single assignment. So, ensure that whatever you are assigning is short and simple to work upon by the students.
- Create groups
Another way to motivate students is creating a group. It supports peer motivation and is a good way to ensure that the students work on their assignments. You can assign group projects to work upon as one single unit, or you can assign individual assignments. For individual assignments, ensure that the peer group keeps track of their own progress and their own ability to complete work and in turn, motivates each other to finish it.
- Provide feedback
Feedback is important to motivate students to work on their civil engineering course. It allows them to improve on their previous work and redress any issues that they might encounter with the subject.
Moreover, any good remark or observation makes them more enthusiastic and allows them to work harder on the next assignment. So, if you want those assignments on your table on time, then ensure that you provide constructive feedback that would motivate the students.
- Help students out
There would be some students in your class who would not possess the same amount of capabilities and would struggle with the lesson plans. Such students give up easily and thus, need to invest the extra amount of effort. You need to work along with such students to ensure that they are learning and in order to motivate them to perform well in their assignments.
You can do this by helping them sort through their problems which they encounter, by building strategies for studying that would help them out and by finding suitable study techniques to help complete their assignments.
- Allow them to choose
Another way to motivate students is to ensure that the students are presented with ample amount of choices. Let them voice their opinions about what they think might be the possible useful topics or questions they can work upon. Let them suggest any topic which they want to work upon and assign such topics as assignments. Also, present with alternate assignments, if possible, on which they can work, as per their wish.
- Establish strategies
You need to establish certain strategies as well in order to motivate students. Try to connect the assignment with something that is happening in the real world, to make it more interesting and a bit more challenging.
Change up your style to make it less boring, since civil engineering is quite boring in itself. Like for example, instead of making them define terms as an assignment, ask them to come up with a construction design that would comprise of those terms or would be integral to that design and provide feedback based on that.
Tips to help them motivate
Listed below are some tips that would help you to motivate your students better:
- Get to know your students better and keep all channels of communication open. Make it a two way street and share something about your own self with them as well, that would motivate them.
- Site ample amount of examples to help them out.
- Site additional help for them, if required. There still might be some students who would fail to keep up with the pace of the class or wouldn’t be able to comprehend some topics. For such students, you can advise them to opt for help from online educational websites that would help smooth their issues by making them understand in simple terms.
- Set realistic deadlines to provide with ample amount of time to work upon the assignments.
- Never give up on students.
So, go ahead and keep your students motivated enough to make them more interested in the coursework. However, do not involve with them as it can prove to be counterproductive as well. Keep a healthy balance and a working relationship with your students that would help them achieve all their goals in life.
Remember, assignments can enrich the lives of the students only if done right and if they do not stress them out.
“Believe you can and you are halfway there.”
