Raising Confidence Levels Using Motivational Contingency Design Techniques

Motivation plays a key role in learning and teaching, in particular in technology enhanced learning environments. According to motivational theories, proper contingency design is an important prerequisite to motivate learners. In this paper, we demonstrate how confidence levels in an adaptive educational system can be raised using a contingency design technique. Learners that saw parts of a complete picture depending on their performance were more confident to solve the next task than learners who did not. Results suggest that it is possible to raise confidence levels of learners through appropriate contingency design and thus to automatically adapt to their motivational states.