currently serves as the Executive Director of the Caruth Institute for Engineering Education, the TI Distiniguished Chair in Engineering Education, and a Professor in Simmons School of Eduation and Human Development at Southern Methodist University. Stolk strives to design and facilitate extraordinary learning experiences. As a start-up faculty member at Olin College (2001College ( -2015, Stolk created numerous project-based and interdisciplinary courses and programs that invite students to take control of their learning, grapple with complex systems, engage with each other and the world in new ways, and emerge as confident, agile, self-directed learners. Stolk's research aims to understand how students experience different classroom settings, particularly with regard to how individuals express situational motivations and develop their own beliefs about learning. A core aspect of his professional work involves translating research to practice, by equipping instructors with design tools and conceptual frameworks that enable them to understand their classrooms in new ways, and to gain confidence in trying new approaches and deploying course prototypes. Stolk consults with a wide range of academic institutions on the design of unconventional curricula, and he offers hands-on workshops to faculty around the world. Zastavker's research interests lie in the field of STEM education with specific emphasis on innovative pedagogical and curricular practices at the intersection with the issues of gender and diversity. Dr. Zastavker is currently working with Dr. Stolk on an NSF-supported project to understand students' motivational attitudes in a variety of educational environments with the goal of improving learning opportunities for students and equipping faculty with the knowledge and skills necessary to create such opportunities. One of the founding faculty at Olin College, Dr. Zastavker has been engaged in development and implementation of project-based experiences in fields ranging from science to engineering and design to social sciences (e.g., Critical Reflective Writing; Teaching and Learning in Undergraduate Science and Engineering, etc.) All of these activities share a common goal of creating curricular and pedagogical structures as well as academic cultures that facilitate students' interests, motivation, and desire to persist in engineering. Through this work, outreach, and involvement in the community, Dr. Zastavker continues to focus on the issues of women and minorities in science/engineering. This research paper investigates the relationship between two of the most ubiquitous classroom activities -lecture and discussion -and their correlation to student motivation. This investigation uses a dataset from 27 introductory STEM classes across 7 institutions that participated in weekly surveys, in which students listed the activities they had recently undertaken and then completed a multiple choice motivation survey. The motivation survey, based on the Self-Determination Theory (SDT) framework, measured the leve...