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Getting students at all grade levels motivated and engaged in their education is paramount as schools work to make up for the unfinished learning that happened over the past few years. It’s a task made more difficult by the damage the pandemic did to students’ social-emotional skills.

But figuring out how to solve that motivation puzzle is not easy. To begin with, there seems to be a disconnect between how motivated students currently say they are and what teachers think about student motivation. According to exclusive survey data from the EdWeek Research Center, 86 percent of students ages 13-19 say they feel motivated to do their best in school, while 67 percent of teachers said their students were motivated to work hard.

That raises the question: How can schools identify what motivation strategies are most effective and put them to work for all students?

This special report tackles that question by examining by how mentorship programs can drive student engagement, what it takes to get elementary students excited about learning, how work-based learning experiences help high school students see the relevance of the classes they take in school, and the traits of teachers who are consistently successful in motivating students.