Motivation: How people learn
15 Jul 2025
Psychologist and new appointee Martin Daumiller studies how motivation affects the way we teach and learn. He often finds himself having to refute myths.
15 Jul 2025
Psychologist and new appointee Martin Daumiller studies how motivation affects the way we teach and learn. He often finds himself having to refute myths.
He knows that motivation is complex: "There is no one recipe that motivates everyone. | © LMU
Martin Daumiller’s research subject means he is much in demand: Wherever he goes, people want to talk to him. That is understandable, as his subject – motivation – concerns us all. The psychologist himself puts it in a nutshell: “Without it, none of us would do anything.”
Professor of Educational Psychology at LMU since October 2024, Daumiller repeatedly has to counter arguments based on decades-old ideas. One is that there are different learning styles. Not true. On the contrary: Anyone who believes they can only learn well in a particular way – be it visual, haptic or auditive – squanders good opportunities to learn. The crucial factor, Daumiller asserts, is not sensory perception, but a suitable strategy and what you already know.
Nor is it true that intrinsic motivation is the most important thing. This argument, Daumiller says, is too short-sighted. “To be intrinsically motivated means that you do something for the sake of doing it, because learning itself is perceived as an enjoyable experience. But especially in the school routine, that is hardly ever the case. Swotting up on vocabulary for the pure joy of doing so? A rare occurrence indeed!” From a scientific perspective, motivation is better conceptualized as a spectrum of self-determination. If you learn in a self-determined manner – for example because you are interested in the subject, or because the knowledge will be useful for your later career choice – then you will be more motivated in tackling what you need to learn.
This realization also shows that there is little evidence to back up the frequent assertion that we can only learn under pressure. Why? Because people who can decide independently what they want to spend their time on often put more effort into their work. “That said,” Daumiller concedes, “it also depends on the prevailing conditions and on whether someone can cope with this level of autonomy, or whether they still need more guidance.”
When talking to Martin Daumiller, one thing quickly becomes clear: There are no easy answers relating to motivation. He personally derived the motivation for his studies from his interest in the subject matter. That was what spurred him on.
I have always been fascinated by learning and how it worksMartin Daumiller, Professor of Educational Psychology at LMU
“I have always been fascinated by learning and how it works,” the psychologist says. That also has to do with his hobby, karate: He began as a child and was soon training younger children. “Through my experience in karate instruction , I began reflecting on how people learn and what contribution I could make as an instructor. For that, I obviously also needed science. I wanted to know: What underlies how we learn? How does learning even work? And how can you arrive at reliable statements about it?”
While he was still at school, he wrote a sixth-form term paper comparing a Bavarian elementary school with an English one. “That was where I started out with educational research,” says Daumiller, who first began studying to become a teacher. He was particularly fascinated by the psychology classes. At the same time, he completed bachelor’s degree courses in mathematics and education. Following these achievements with a master’s degree in education was his “springboard to doctoral research”.
As early as the second semester, he himself was already teaching in the role of tutor. “I thoroughly enjoyed it,” he recalls. “It allowed me to connect my passion for the subject with my enthusiasm for teaching.” After his first state examination to become a teacher, Daumiller decided to do a doctorate. He was supported by a doctoral scholarship from the German Academic Scholarship Foundation and wrote his thesis on what motivates university lecturers.
LMU has an outstanding reputation in the field of psychology. For me, it has always been a dream to come here. I am thrilled that the dream has now come true.Martin Daumiller, Professor of Educational Psychology at LMU
This was where his academic career shifted into gear. Daumiller stayed at the University of Augsburg, initially as a research associate and later as an assistant professor. Research stays took him to destinations such as the USA and South Korea. In 2024, he assumed a visiting professorship on teaching and learning psychology in schools at the University of Vienna, before taking up his current position at LMU in the fall of the same year. “LMU has an outstanding reputation in the field of psychology,” he asserts. “For me, it has always been a dream to come here. I am thrilled that the dream has now come true.”
Daumiller’s first semester as a professor at LMU was “fantastic”, a lot of fun, he says. The students have a tremendous thirst for knowledge, and his lecturing benefits from his teacher training background. “I’ve always got one foot in the school. The students notice that.” And since his wife is a teacher, even discussions at home often revolve around the same topic.
At work, too, he is now discovering how fruitful close links between theory and practice can be. A practical day organized for the first time by the Department of Psychology and involving practical school psychologists was very well received. Daumiller also incorporates regular dialogue with an experienced teacher in his lectures – and is happy that this kind of format “not only inspires the students but also helps sustain our dialogue with specialist practitioners.”
When you step into a classroom as a teacher and are met by open, expectant faces, something stirs inside you – it’s a completely different dynamic compared to moments where you perceive poor motivation to begin with.Martin Daumiller, Professor of Educational Psychology at LMU
The professor himself provides many advanced training courses for teachers and knows how challenging it is to stay motivated – and to motivate others – day in, day out. “When you step into a classroom as a teacher and are met by open, expectant faces, something stirs inside you – it’s a completely different dynamic compared to moments where you perceive poor motivation to begin with.” Sadly, transferring academic insights to the school routine is not easy. One reason is quite simply the nature of the research subject itself: Motivation is a complex topic. “There is no universal formula that gets everyone motivated.”
Nor is it easy for teachers to keep up with the current knowledge curve. “Our graduates arrive at schools with a top educational grounding. But often, too little happens after that,” Daumiller laments. Apart from forging closer links between schools and universities, he sees the idea of communicating scientific evidence in a more readily understandable form as one way that could make it easier for teachers to stay on the leading edge.
In his first academic papers, Daumiller tackled the subject of learning with digital media. Right now, he is cooperating with the University of Augsburg (Professor Markus Dresel) and TU Munich (Professor Tina Seidel) on a project to explore how teachers’ motivation impacts schoolchildren.
New technologies – such as eye movement trackers – are being deployed in this context. “We are using eye tracking to study what teachers do differently depending on how motivated they are and what goals they have.” Initial findings show that the way teachers look at the class and their focus on specific individuals varies depending on their given goals – to give special help to weaker pupils or to keep the class quieter, for instance. “This shows us how motivation acts as a filter, shaping not only what we perceive, but also how we interpret those perceptions.”
Children often start out at school full of curiosity and joy. But this initial motivation declines quickly for many of them.Martin Daumiller, Professor of Educational Psychology at LMU
Teachers have to combat dwindling motivation from as early as elementary school. “Children often start out at school full of curiosity and joy. But this initial motivation declines quickly for many of them,” Daumiller explains. “At first, many children overestimate their abilities. With experience, they develop a more realistic understanding of their capabilities. In this way, a personal standard of competence that helps them assess their own efforts gradually takes shape.” On the other hand, Daumiller also makes it clear that deterioration of motivation is not inevitable: “Whether the children stay motivated depends largely on how teachers design their lessons.”
Daumiller’s research covers a broad spectrum of issues relating to motivation in educational and academic contexts – from learning processes at school to digital media to scientific practice. He is particularly interested in how individual motivational forces interact with institutional structures and cultural contexts.
This interplay between motivation and context becomes clearly apparent in his research into academic fraud: “If a person wants to achieve very good performance, for example, that does not automatically lead to fraudulent behavior. The situation doesn’t become critical unless the person also assumes that others are cheating anyway. Only then does the likelihood of misconduct increase.” A similar effect can arise where only the result and not the pathway to the result is assessed. “The impact of one and the same source of motivation depends heavily on the environment. And it is precisely here that we can take action in practice.”
Alongside matters of academic integrity, Daumiller also concerns himself intensively with the motivational conditions surrounding academic work. In a recent international study of academic freedom, his team demonstrated that not only structural guarantees but – above all – subjective perceptions of freedom were critical to researchers’ motivation and wellbeing. “If researchers feel that they are not free – because of bureaucratic obstacles, politicized funding logic or even genuine censorship – then this negatively affects their motivation and their mental health,” he affirms.
With the aid of digital media and generative AI, people can be addressed personally, individually, depending on what helps them best in a given learning situation.Martin Daumiller, Professor of Educational Psychology
In Daumiller’s area of research, artificial intelligence is opening up many ways for the individual to act on scientific insights. “With the aid of digital media and generative AI, people can be addressed personally, individually, depending on what helps them best in a given learning situation. There is a lot of mileage in this approach. Right now, we are just about to incorporate key research findings from instruction research into adaptive, digital learning environments.”
International collaboration is another essential factor in teaching and learning research, the professor adds. “The fact that many of the participants in psychological studies come from Western societies or are even psychology students themselves is a problem. We humans are not all the same. We behave differently depending on the surrounding culture. It is only by engaging with researchers worldwide that we can develop robust models of human behavior that take individual differences seriously and have a lasting effect in the context of education.”
Daumiller, M., Böheim, R., Alijagic, A., Lewalter, D., Gegenfurtner, A., Seidel, T., & Dresel, M. (2025). Guiding attention in the classroom: An eye‐tracking study on the associations between preservice teachers' goals and noticing of student interactions. British Journal of Educational Psychology