Motivational Theory

Motivation is the force that drives a person to do something. It includes varying emotions such as: initiative, drive, intensity, persistence, that inhibit, neutralize, or promote goal-directed behaviors. It is internal. Students may choose to learn or escape from learning. If they choose to be active in school and learn they have a belief in their efficacy to learn and the power of knowing. They are ready to learn. If they have a belief that they are incapable of learning and powerless to change they will choose not to be actively involved or withdraw and their learning and performance is reduced to a lower level. In actuality people are usually somewhere between these two extreems, represented by the line between the arrows in the diagram:

Outstanding teachers motivate students to participate with interactions that invite, encourage, and teach students how to set and achieve goals. Students who acquire positive behaviors transfer and generalize them to new experiences that insure success on tasks in other environments.

Teachers achieve this through manipulating the environment and assisting students in new learning experiences. This is achieved by challenging students with a learning experience, maintaining high expectations, assisting students to resolve conflicts and achieve success. Students’ involvement is crucial and degrees of involvement are illustrated in the following model.

Eric Jensen in Teaching With the Brain in Mind discussed the latest information available about the brain and its implications for learning and teaching. This research suggests that what people learn becomes an integral part of their total body and brain’s physiology. This physiology not only controls the intellectual responses a person is capable of making but the emotional responses that influence the person’s actions or inactions. These responses are not singular in nature, but more like an explosion that ripples changes throughout the body creating internal changes that accompany the external observable behaviors. We must recognize that what appears as a simple response is accompanied by internal chemical and neurological responses that have been created by the individual over his or her lifetime through their interactions in their environment. These interactions both positive and negative have created the individual over its lifetime. We can not assume to effect change in a relatively short period.

William Glasser in Control Theory identified what he believes are five variables (psychodynamic and/or humanistic) that control decisions people make: 1) love, 2) power, 3) freedom, 4) fun, and 5) survival.

James G. Wilson in Moral Sense identified what he believes are four senses (psychodynamic and/or biophysical) which all people have: 1) sympathy, 2) fairness, 3) self-control, and 4) duty.

A student’s motivation is a product of their life experiences that have been affected by many variables, like the ones outlined above, and characterized by the individual’s perceptions of their success or failure to set and achieve goals. M. Kay Alderman (1990) links motivation to student success with the following model:

Goal setting and self monitoring plays an important part in cultivating self-motivation (Bandura, 1986). When students first encounter a task they set goals. They may decide the task is hopeless and decide not to try or if forced, elect to fail. Or decide a problem is challenging and jump right in to solve the problem. They may have just finished a similar task successfully and have high expectations of success on the next task. Or they may have just failed a task and have low expectations for success on the next task.

Through self-talk or self-monitoring while setting goals students anticipate their success or failure based on ability, effort, difficulty of task, or luck. If they anticipate success, they will equate that success to their ability, effort, easiness of task, or good luck. If they anticipate failure, they will equate that failure with their lack of ability, effort, difficulty or task or bad luck. However, if they previously failed and contribute that failure to past inability to select an appropriate strategy or lack of effort, then might set a goal with the expectation of success with their selection of a new strategy or increasing their effort. With a motivation theory, or model, a teacher has a resource to understand reasons for success and failure and thereby assist students in setting goals, selecting learning strategies, and positively affect students' motivation in other ways.

Failure: People who perceive the cause of their failure as a lack of effort or poor selection of a strategy are more likely to be motivated to set positive goals for similar tasks in the futue. People who perceive a cause of their failure as a result of bad luck or other variables beyond their control are unlikely to be motivated to learn. This effects their attribution of success or in this case failure. With enough failures they will not be intrinsically motivated to achieve and may not attempt to achieve a goal no matter what extrinsic motivation is provided. Over time students learn maladaptive behaviors to avoid certain tasks which creates a maladaptive self-fulfilling prophecy. Effective teachers use verbal interactions (positive statments, encouragement, specific praise, and feedforward - Billy Sharp) to help students decrease maladaptive behaviors, set goals for success, and achieve initial and continual success.

Success: Student success is not enough. They must personally know what contributed to their success. They must understand it was effort, strategy, luck, ability, or the task. The variable teachers most often attribute to success is effort and students often equate effort with inability. However, teachers and students need to understand that failure,is not always caused by lack of effort and effort alone will not insure success. The idea, "if it takes a long time to master a problem, then the person must be dumb," must be overcome. Again positive statements, specific praise, encouragement, and feedforward (Billy Sharp) enable students to learn positive behaviors to become successful and understand how effort and ability increase; knowledge, skill, and use of learning strategies. Successive successes increase students' self-efficiency and self-confidence in the ability to learn. All people learn. However, they may not be motivated to learn what we want them to learn. Explore what students know and discuss how they learned it. Video games may be a good place to start for some students.

Suggestions on how to increase motivation:

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