Motivation

Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic

 Student Motivation
 Motivation is typically defined as the forces
that account for the arousal, selection,
direction, and continuation of behavior.
 Organisms tend to repeat actions that are
reinforced and that behavior can be shaped by
reinforcement.
 Student Motivation
 There is an element of inertia in student
motivation, in that motivated students, who
tend to be confident and persistent, are easy to
keep motivated; but undermotivated students
tend to resist accepting new information or
revising their thinking, which may make it
more difficult for them to become motivated.
 Student Motivation
 To a very large degree, students expect to
learn if their teachers expect them to learn.
 One misconception is that some students are
unmotivated.
 What teachers really mean is that students are
not motivated to behave in the way teachers
would like them to behave.
 Motivation To Learn
 Influenced by the meaningfulness, value, and
benefits of academic tasks to the learner.
 Created through general experience but
stimulated most directly through modeling,
communication of expectations, and direct
instruction or socialization by significant
others (especially parents and teachers).
 Factors That Enhance
Motivation
 Instructor's enthusiasm
 Relevance of the material
 Organization of the course
 Appropriate difficulty level of the material
 Active involvement of students
 Variety
 Rapport between teacher and students
 Use of appropriate, concrete, and
understandable examples
 Incorporating Instructional
Behaviors That Motivate Students
 Hold high but realistic expectations for your students
 Help students set achievable goals for themselves.
 Tell students what they need to do to succeed in your
course.
 Strengthen students' self-motivation.
 Avoid creating intense competition among students.
 Be enthusiastic about your subject.
Structuring the Course to Motivate
Students
 Work from students' strengths and interests
 When possible, let students have some say in
choosing what will be studied
 Increase the difficulty of the material as the
semester progresses
 Vary your teaching methods
 De-emphasizing Grades
 Emphasize mastery and learning rather than
grades
 Design tests that encourage the kind of
learning you want students to achieve
 Avoid using grades as threats
Motivating Students by Responding
to Their Work
 Give students feedback as quickly as possible
 Reward success
 Introduce students to the good work done by
their peers
 Be specific when giving negative feedback
 Avoid demeaning comments
 Avoid giving in to students' pleas for "the
answer" to homework problems
 Suggestions for Teaching in Your Classroom:
Motivating Students to Learn
1. Use behavioral techniques to help students
exert themselves and work toward remote
goals.
2. Make sure that students know what they are to
do, how to proceed, and how to determine
when they have achieved goals.
 Suggestions for Teaching in Your Classroom:
Motivating Students to Learn
3. Do everything possible to satisfy deficiency needs --
physiological, safety, belongingness, and esteem.
a. Accommodate the instructional program to the
physiological needs of your students.
b. Make your room physically and psychologically safe.
c. Show your students that you take an interest in them
and that they belong in your classroom.
d. Arrange learning experiences so that all students can
gain at least a degree of esteem.
 Suggestions for Teaching in Your Classroom:
Motivating Students to Learn
4. Enhance the attractions and minimize the dangers of
growth choices.
5. Direct learning experiences toward feelings of
success in an effort to encourage an orientation
toward achievement, a positive self-concept, and a
strong sense of self-efficacy.
a. Make use of objectives that are challenging but
attainable and, when appropriate, that involve student
input.
b. Provide knowledge of results by emphasizing the
positive.
 Suggestions for Teaching in Your Classroom:
Motivating Students to Learn
6. Try to encourage the development of need
achievement, self-confidence, and self-
direction in students who need these qualities.
 a. Use achievement-motivation training
techniques.
 b. Use cooperative-learning methods.
 Suggestions for Teaching in Your Classroom:
Motivating Students to Learn
 7. Try to make learning interesting by
emphasizing activity, investigation, adventure,
social interaction, and usefulness.

 It is assumed from these research findings that

a classroom instructor can have a great deal of
influence over the student’s willingness to
participate in the educational process.
 Types of Motivation
 A student who is INTRINSICALLY motivated
undertakes an activity for its own sake, for the
enjoyment it provides, the learning it permits,
or the feelings of accomplishment it evokes.
 An EXTRINSICALLY motivated student
performs in order to obtain some reward or
avoid some punishment external to the activity
itself, such as grades, stickers, or teacher
approval.
 Extrinsic Motivation
 Most of the activities in which teachers, students, and
other human beings engage are most directly
influenced by extrinsic rather than intrinsic
motivation.
 Extrinsic motivators or rewards are frequently used in
schools. Candy, homework passes, or field trips may
be offered.
 Withholding or denying rewards serves to punish
students whose behavior or performance does not
meet expectations.
 Extrinsic Motivation
 Students may be drawn to extrinsic motivation
because it rewards "good" or "best" behavior.

 Teachers may be drawn to rewards because

they result in improved behavior in the short
term.
Problems with Extrinsic Motivation
 Opponents of extrinsic rewards argue that they
undermine learning by bribing or coercing
desired behaviors from students. In their view,
pursuit of learning or knowledge is properly
motivated by enjoyment or curiosity rather
than by recognition, reward, or fear of
negative consequences.
 Intrinsic Motivation
 Intrinsic motivation- a motivation to engage
in activities that enhance or maintain a
person's self-concept.
 Intrinsic Motivation is what people will do
without external inducement.
 Intrinsically motivating activities are those in
which people will engage for no reward other
than the interest and enjoyment that
accompanies them .
 The Factors That Promote Intrinsic
Motivation
 Challenge- People are best motivated when they are
working toward personally meaningful goals whose
attainment requires activity at a continuously
optimal (intermediate) level of difficulty.
1. Set personally meaningful goals.
2. Make attainment of goals probable but uncertain.
3. Give in-progress performance feedback.
4. Relate goals to learners' self esteem.
 The Factors That Promote Intrinsic
Motivation
 Curiosity - Something in the physical environment
attracts the learner's attention or there is an optimal
level of discrepancy between present knowledge or
skills and what these could be if the learner engaged
in some activity.
1. Stimulate sensory curiosity by making abrupt
changes that will be perceived by the senses.
2. Stimulate cognitive curiosity by making a person
wonder about something (i.e., stimulate the learner's
interest).
 The Factors That Promote Intrinsic
Motivation
 Control - People have a basic tendency to
want to control what happens to them.
1. Make clear the cause-and-effect relationships
between what students are doing and things
that happen in real life.
2. Enable the learners to believe that their work
will lead to powerful effects.
3. Allow learners to freely choose what they
want to learn and how they will learn it.
 The Factors That Promote Intrinsic
Motivation
 Fantasy - Learners use mental images of
things and situations that are not actually
present to stimulate their behavior.
1. Make a game out of learning.
2. Help learners imagine themselves using the
learned information in real- life settings.
3. Make the fantasies intrinsic rather than
extrinsic.
 The Factors That Promote Intrinsic
Motivation
 Competition - Learners feel satisfaction by
comparing their performance favorably to that of
others.
1. Competition occurs naturally as well as artificially.
2. Competition is more important for some people than
for others.
3. People who lose at competition often suffer more
than the winners profit.
4. Competition sometimes reduces the urge to be
helpful to other learners.
 The Factors That Promote Intrinsic
Motivation
 Cooperation - Learners feel satisfaction by
helping others achieve their goals.
1. Cooperation occurs naturally as well as
artificially.
2. Cooperation is more important for some
people than for others.
3. Cooperation is a useful real-life skill.
4. Cooperation requires and develops
interpersonal skills.
 The Factors That Promote Intrinsic
Motivation
 Recognition - Learners feel satisfaction
when others recognize and appreciate their
accomplishments.
1. Recognition requires that the process or
product or some other result of the learning
activity be visible.
2. Recognition differs from competition in that
it does not involve a comparison with the
performance of someone else.
 Strategies For 
Enhancing Motivation
Before trying any of these strategies it is
important to begin by establishing the idea
that treating them differently is not unfair,
it is respecting their differences

1. Challenge Them
 Challenge gives students an opportunity to
discover the relationship between effort and
success; between success and motivation,
and to develop higher self-concept.
 Strategies For 
Enhancing Motivation
2. Build on Strengths First
 Give students an opportunity to use their talents
to achieve success by developing their strengths
 When the primary focus is on student
weaknesses students are spending much of their
time being unsuccessful, practicing what they
do badly. This lowers self esteem and lowers
motivation
 Failure is unmotivating. Success is motivating!
 Strategies For 
Enhancing Motivation
3. Offer Choices
 Offering choices develops ownership
 Negotiate

4. Provide a Secure Environment

 Permit children to fail without penalty
 Students should learn that they can and must
learn from their mistakes
 Strategies For 
Enhancing Motivation
 5. Teach Them How to Make Their Tasks
More Manageable
 Narrowing or broadening the topic to a
challenging but manageable size is very
important for developing motivation.
 Strategies For 
Enhancing Motivation
6. Use Rewards & Punishment with caution
 Both external factors that can rob students of personal
control. Obviously there must be consequences for
different kinds of behaviors, and real success needs
some kind of recognition or attention.
 Rewards cause students to work for the wrong
reasons. Punishment often fosters resentment and
lack of co-operation.
 Rewards are used for a short time only.
 Strategies For 
Enhancing Motivation
 7. Help Students Develop An Internal Locus
Of Control
 Students who feel they have the power to
control some events in their lives are more
likely to become self motivated than students
who see themselves as powerless. If they don't
believe they have any power/control over the
events in their lives... then everything that
goes wrong is someone else's fault, not theirs.
 Strategies For 
Enhancing Motivation
8. Avoid Power Struggles
 Poorly motivated students are often very
manipulative.
9. Use Ambiguity Occasionally
 Some children are convinced that every question has
only one right answer.
 If they see all questions as being either right or wrong
they will probably see themselves as being good
when they are right and bad when they are wrong.
 Strategies For 
Enhancing Motivation
10. Offer Open-ended Activities to Develop Creativity
 Give them opportunities and strategies to develop their
creativity.

11. Teach Students to Evaluate Themselves

 Self-evaluation needs to address the questions: "What
was done well?" & "How can it be improved?" It is far
more powerful for students to recognize the answers to
these questions than it is for them to be told the
answers.
 Strategies For 
Enhancing Motivation
12. Attention Seeking Behaviors
 Positive adult attention can be a highly motivating
factor but only if it is earned by reasonable effort.
 Negative attention for some children is just as
satisfying as positive attention and in fact if they are
used to a great deal of negative attention it may be
more comfortable because it is so familiar.
 They should receive a positive attention response any
time they take a risk or make an effort.
 Strategies For 
Enhancing Motivation
13. Competition
 Competition can enhance or reduce motivation
depending on how it is used. It is good for
some, but it may result in a few winners and
many losers.
 The long term goal is to teach children to loose
gracefully and use defeat as motivation to
improve.
 Strategies For 
Enhancing Motivation
14. Students Need To Understand The
Relevance Of All Their School Activities
 Students who do not understand the relevance
of a school activity are not usually motivated
to accomplish it unless they are motivated to
please the teacher.
 Strategies For 
Enhancing Motivation
15. Perfectionism - Is It Good or Bad?
 Perfectionism is getting hung-up on being
perfect.
 Students need to see us (teachers and parents)
making mistakes occasionally.
 Strategies For 
Enhancing Motivation
16. Reinforce Required Strategies
 One reason students have difficulty sustaining
their motivation when working independently
is because they either don't understand or don't
remember the required strategies.
 "Just because it's been taught, doesn't mean it's
been caught."
 Strategies For 
Enhancing Motivation
17. Teach A Variety Of Organizational
Strategies
 Students need to know that there are countless
numbers of effective organizational strategies.
 Strategies For 
Enhancing Motivation
18. Role Models
 Some apparently unmotivated student are not
really unmotivated but are motivated to follow
an inappropriate model.
 Strategies For 
Enhancing Motivation
19. Differentiate Instruction with Tiered
Assignments or Layered Curriculum
techniques
 Differentiated Instruction is another good way
to empower and motivate students.
 Strategies For 
Enhancing Motivation
20. Scaffolding
 Scaffolding relates to the supportive role that a
teacher undertakes to ensure success in
activities where a student is being challenged.
 Strategies For 
Enhancing Motivation
21.  Use Computers
 Developing quality presentations using
authoring software, or presentation software,
such as PowerPoint, is also highly motivating
for students.
 Equally motivating (and not nearly as difficult
as some teachers may think) developing web
pages to present student work is one of the
most highly motivating activities.
 Rimm's Laws:
 Sylvia Rimm, Ph.D
 Family Achievement Clinic - Educational
Assessment Service, Inc.
1. Children are more likely to be motivated to achieve if
they get the same clear and positive message about
school effort and expectations from both parents.

2. Children learn appropriate behaviors more easily if

they have an effective model.
 Rimm's Laws:
3. Communication between adults in front of a
child dramatically affects children's behaviors
and self -perceptions.
4. Overreactions by parents to child's successes
or failures leads them to feel either intense
pressure to succeed or despair and
discouragement in dealing with failure.
 Rimm's Laws:
5. Children experience more tension worrying
about their work than when they are doing it.

6. Children develop self concept through struggle.

7. Deprivation and excess exhibit the same

symptoms. (attention, affection, freedom and
pressure)
 Rimm's Laws:
8. Children develop confidence and an internal
sense of control if power is given to them in
gradually increasing increments as they show
maturity and responsibility.

9. Children become oppositional if one adult

sides with them against the other parent or a
teacher, making them feel more powerful than
the other adult.
 Rimm's Laws:
10. Adults should avoid confrontations with
children unless they can be sure of the
outcomes.
11. Children become achievers only if they learn
to function in competition.
12. Children will continue to achieve if they
usually see the relationship between the
learning process and its outcome.
Conclusion