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This article was coauthored by Sara Johnson and Alex Staup in collaborative effort between MCode for Students and Bryan College, drawing on shared experiences in supporting student growth and formation. For readers interested in learning more about motivational assessment and its application in higher education, MCode for Students offers additional information and resources for institutions seeking to help students better understand what drives them.
Most of us who work within higher education can picture the student whose file raises concerns before classes even begin. Maybe the academic indicators aren’t particularly strong, or there’s uncertainty about major, career, or long-term plans. If you’re looking only at the data, the outlook feels uncertain. But when we meet the student, they’re engaged in conversations, they build meaningful relationships, and they even contribute in class (most of the time). Given the right opportunities, they seem to come alive.
That gap between what our data says about students and what actually drives them is, we think, where we as student development practitioners have an opportunity to do some of our most meaningful work. Yes, our data helps inform approaches to increase retention and student success. However, as Conn (2025) noted, retention isn’t really the end goal. Student formation that emphasizes academic progress, well-being, and engagement is. The most enduring value of an undergraduate experience is less about landing a specific job and more about helping students become the kind of person who can do meaningful work and contribute well wherever they land.
In a faith-based context, that framing carries even more weight. We believe students are made by a Creator God, designed with particular callings and ways of engaging the world. The work of student development isn’t just developmental in a clinical sense. It’s formational in a theological one. Helping a student understand how they’re uniquely wired isn’t a soft skill. It’s an act of stewardship.
What Motivational Assessment Offers
These undertones with a focus on student calling are one of the reasons why, at Bryan College, motivational assessment has become one of the most important tools in the formation toolkit. What drew us to motivational assessment, specifically MCode For Students, was its story-based methodology. Rather than asking students to respond to a series of abstract statements, it invites them to reflect on real moments from their own lives — times they felt energized, engaged, and at their best.
The data emerges from their stories, not from a trait checklist, which is consistent with what narrative psychologist Dan McAdams calls the heart of personality science — the richness of human individuality is best captured through the individual life story (McAdams & Pals, 2006). Students aren’t just completing an assessment. They’re beginning to narrate themselves. And that kind of reflective self-narration is, in our experience, one of the most underutilized capacities we can develop in a first-year student.
It’s also worth naming what motivational assessment is not: a personality label. One phrase that frequently emerges in conversations with students is, “This is not who you are, but what drives you.” That framing matters, especially for students who have internalized a story that something is wrong with them. Kranzow (2022) describes this in her work on imposter syndrome, noting how students in transition frequently arrive carrying a felt sense of inadequacy that has nothing to do with their actual capacity. Motivational self-awareness gives them a way out of that story.
What It Looks Like in Practice
In the Classroom
At Bryan, motivational assessment is built into our Foundations of Student Success course, which runs for the first five to six weeks of the semester and serves students who, by traditional metrics, are most at risk of not finishing their first year. The goal of this course is not only to acclimate these students to the college environment, but help them reflect on the type of student, and ultimately the type of person, they want to be.
Completing the assessment and reflecting on results is a graded component. We grade it because we want students to take it seriously, to understand that this kind of self-reflection is worth their time. In their final paper, they’re required to engage with what they’ve found with a focus on how understanding their motivations can contribute to their broader success.
The most common shift we observe is students who arrive assuming something is wrong with them, beginning to reframe how they think. A student struggling to focus in one-on-one tutoring sessions realizes he’s deeply relational and does his best thinking in a study group. As students grow in this self-knowledge, they no longer wrestle with frustration about their inability to fit in, but instead can consider ways to foster the conditions that help them engage well. One student who navigated such a journey described, “Even if students have what it takes to succeed in something, if they’re negatively motivated, they will struggle to succeed. Now that I know my key motivations, I know the path that I need to take to be successful.”
Beyond the Classroom
However, like any assessment tool, the value is largely found in the reflection and conversation that follow. For that reason, the assessment is embedded within a broader developmental process that includes advising conversations, class discussion, and written reflection.
We have found that a tool like this offers benefits that extend beyond the classroom. For example, Calling & Career uses motivational data as a starting point in one-on-one coaching to help students explore career options and vocational direction. Rather than opening with a deficits framework, motivational reflections help students consider where and how they engage best and how they might more deeply connect with their purpose.
Motivational awareness also reshaped how our staff team worked together. As we gained a greater appreciation for motivational differences, we became less likely to interpret differences as deficiencies. In fact, we could consider how tasks that drained one team member often energized another. Understanding those differences allowed us to collaborate more intentionally and steward one another’s giftings more effectively.
A Word on the Research
While the experience at Bryan has been shaped primarily through practice, it is not disconnected from broader scholarship. What we have observed in students reflects insights found in both narrative psychology and motivation research. Narrative psychology has long emphasized the role of story in shaping identity and meaning (McAdams & Pals, 2006). We have seen something similar in our work with students. As they reflect on meaningful experiences from their own lives, many begin to notice patterns they had never considered before. Ultimately, the research matters not because it proves a particular tool works, but because it supports a larger conviction – self-awareness is an important part of human flourishing.
An Invitation
Our goal in sharing Bryan’s experience is not to suggest that every institution should adopt the same assessment or implement it in the same way. Every campus has its own culture, mission, and approach to student development. What we hope to contribute is a broader conversation about self-understanding and formation. For those of us who serve in Christian higher education, that work carries particular significance. We believe students are more than a collection of strengths, weaknesses, and outcomes to be measured. They are image bearers whose lives have purpose, meaning, and potential for contribution.
Skipper (2005) urged student development professionals to design programs around students’ developmental needs, not just their academic ones. Motivational self-awareness is exactly that kind of need. It gives students language for who they are at their best, and a way out of the story that something is fundamentally wrong with them.
Whatever tool you use, we’d invite you to ask: Do the students you work with have language for what drives them? Do they know what conditions help them engage well? These are the kinds of questions that help students move from surviving their first year to owning it. We were made to know ourselves, and to use that knowledge in service of something larger. For our students in a faith context, that something isn’t just a career. It’s a calling. Our job is to give them the tools to pursue it well.
References
- Conn, S. (2025). A retention model you will actually use: The development of a retention model grounded in research and designed for practice. Growth: The Journal of the Association for Christians in Student Development, 24(24).
- Kranzow, J. (2022). Advising and supporting college students experiencing imposter syndrome: A Christian perspective. Growth: The Journal of the Association for Christians in Student Development, 21(21).
- McAdams, D.P., & Pals, J.L. (2006). A new Big Five: Fundamental principles for an integrative science of personality. American Psychologist, 61(3), 204–221.
- Skipper, T.L. (2005). Student development in the first college year: A primer for college educators. University of South Carolina, National Resource Center for the First-Year Experience and Students in Transition.
