Managing students motivation and performance

This paper is about an ongoing action research project on developing pedagogy to teach a basic design course in a multidisciplinary university setting. Over the past few years changes were made to teaching approaches, curriculum and learning environment to improve the quality of student learning. The basic approach of this research so far has been to identify negative aspects and try to make changes for improvement. Most of these changes were based on existing research but some followed an evolutionary path. Meaning, if a certain strategy is giving a positive outcome, repeat it. If any changes resulted in negative outcome it was changed. This study will take few steps back and identify/analyze issues that resulted in positive outcome from theoretical perspective. The objective behind this exercise is to develop a framework to help replicate successes when developing similar courses in future.