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Motivation and Affect • Motivation is an inner state that energizes, directs, and sustains behavior. • Close partner of motivation is affect, the feelings, emotions, and general moods that learners bring to bear on a task.
Learners want to believe they are competent and have self-worth. • Children are naturally inclined to make sense of and adapt to their environment. We also learned that events inconsistent with existing knowledge and beliefs can create disequilibrium and spur children to reexamine and possibly revise their current understandings. • Underlying both of these principles may be a basic need for competence—a need for people to believe that they can deal effectively with their environment. • Some evidence indicates that protecting this sense of competence, which is sometimes known as self-worth, is one of people’s highest priorities. • Other people’s judgments and approval play a key role in the development of a sense of competence and self-worth. • an alternative way to maintain self-worth is to avoid failure, because failure gives the impression of low ability. Failure avoidance manifests itself in a variety of ways. Learners might refuse to engage in a task, minimize the task’s importance, or set exceedingly low expectations for their performance.
Learners want to determine the course of their lives to some degree • Some theorists suggest that human beings not only want to feel competent but also want to have a sense of autonomy and self-direction regarding the things they do and the courses their lives take. In other words, human beings may have a basic need for self- determination. • For instance, when we think “I want to do this” or “I would find it valuable to do that,” we have a high sense of self-determination. In contrast, when we think “I have to” or “I should,” we’re telling ourselves that someone or something else is making decisions for us • Learners want to feel connected to other people. • It appears that most people of all ages have a fundamental need to feel socially connected and to secure the love and respect of others. In other words, they have a need for relatedness. • Many children and adolescents place high priority on interacting with friends, often at the expense of getting their schoolwork done. • They may also be concerned about projecting a favorable public image—that is, by looking smart, popular, athletic, or cool. By looking good in the eyes of others, they not only satisfy their need for relatedness but also enhance their sense of self-worth.
How Motivation Affects Behavior and Cognition • Motivation directs behavior toward particular goals. Motivation determines the specific goals toward which learners strive. Thus it affects the choices learners make—for instance, whether to enroll in physics or studio art and whether to spend an evening playing video games with friends. • Motivation increases effort and persistence in activities. In general, motivation increases learners’ time on task, an important factor affecting their learning and achievement. Motivation increases the amount of effort and energy that learners expend in activities directly related to their needs and goals. • Motivation affects cognitive processes. Motivation affects what and how learners mentally process information. For one thing, motivated learners are more likely to pay attention, and attention is critical for getting information into working memory. • Motivation determines what consequences are reinforcing and punishing. The more learners are motivated to achieve academic success, the more proud they will be of an A and the more upset they will be by an F or perhaps even a B (such feelings should remind you of self-imposed contingencies). The more learners want to be accepted and respected by their peers, the more meaningful the approval of the “in-group”will be and the more painful the ridicule of classmates will seem.
MOTIVATION • Goal-directed behavior • Effort and energy • Persistence in activities • Cognitive processing • Impactofconsequences ENHANCED PERFORMANCE • Motivation often leads to improved performance. For instance, learners who are most motivated to learn and excel in classroom activities tend to be the highest achievers. Conversely, learners who are least motivated to master academic subject matter are at high risk for dropping out before they graduate from high school.
extrinsic motivation: Motivation resulting from factors external to the individual and unrelated to the task being performed. • intrinsic motivation: Motivation resulting from personal characteristics or inherent in the task being performed. • Learners who are intrinsically motivated are apt to engage in an activity because it intellectually stimulates them, helps them feel competent and self-determined, or provides an enjoyable vehicle for interacting with friends. • Learners who are extrinsically motivated may want the good grades, money, or recognition that particular activities and accomplishments bring. • In the early elementary grades, most students are eager and excited to learn new things at school. But sometime between grades 3 and 9, their intrinsic motivation to learn and master school subject matter declines. This decline is probably the result of several factors. • As learners get older, they are more frequently reminded of the importance of good grades (extrinsic motivators) for promotion, graduation, and college admission, and many begin to realize that they aren’t necessarily “at the top of the heap” in comparison with their peers. • Furthermore, they become more cognitively able to think about and strive for longtermgoals, and they begin to evaluate school subjects in terms of their relevance to such goals, rather than in terms of any intrinsic appeal.
In some instances extrinsic motivation, perhaps in the form of extrinsic reinforcers for academic achievement or productive behavior, may be the only thing that can get learners on the road to successful classroom achievement and productivity. • Conditions in the learning environment influence intrinsic as well as extrinsic motivation. environmental factors play a significant role in intrinsic motivation as well. For instance, presenting an unexpected, puzzling phenomenon may pique learners’ natural curiosity and interest in a topic. And providing scaffolding and guidance for challenging tasks may entice learners to tackle the tasks strictly for the pleasure and the sense of competence the tasks bring.
Cognitive Factors in Motivation • Learners find some topics inherently interesting. When we say that people have interest in a particular topic or activity, we mean that they find the topic or activity intriguing and engaging. Interest is typically accompanied by cognitive arousal and such feelings as pleasure and excitement. Interest, then, is a form of intrinsic motivation. • Psychologists distinguish between two general types of interest. Situational interest is evoked by something in the immediate environment. Things that are new, different unexpected, or especially vivid often generate situational interest, as do things that involve physical activity or intense emotions. • Learners tend to have personal preferences about the topics they pursue and the activities in which they engage. • Personal interest in a topic fuels a quest to learn more about the topic, and the increased knowledge gained, in turn, promotes greater interest.
To engage voluntarily in activities, learners want their chances of success to be reasonably good • In general, self-efficacy is a learner’s self-constructed judgment about his or her ability to execute certain behaviors or reach certain goals; thus, it affects the learner’s expectations for future performance. • Learners are more likely to initiate and persist in tasks and activities for which they have high self-efficacy. High self-efficacy also leads them to engage in effective cognitive and metacognitive processes (paying attention, elaborating, effectively managing study time, etc.) that help them learn and achieve at higher level. • Social factors, too, play a role in the development of selfefficacy. Seeing other people be successful at an activity—especially seeing successful peers—enhances learners’ own self-efficacy for the activity. • Such collective self-efficacy depends not only on learners’ perceptions of their own and other group members’ capabilities but also on their perceptions of how effectively they can work together and coordinate their roles and responsibilities. • Once learners have developed a high sense of self-efficacy in a particular content domain, an occasional failure is unlikely to dampen their optimism much. In fact, when these learners encounter small setbacks on the way to achieving success, they learn that sustained effort and perseverance are key ingredients of that success. In other words, they develop resilient self-efficacy.
When learners think their chances of success are slim, they may behave in ways that make success even less likely. • They may also engage in self-handicapping—that is, doing things that actually undermine their chances of success. Self handicapping can be in a form of: Reducing effort: Putting forth an obviously insufficient amount of effort to succeed Misbehaving: Engaging in off-task behaviors in class Setting unattainably high goals: Working toward goals that even the most capable individuals couldn’t achieve Taking on too much: Assuming so many responsibilities that no one could possibly accomplish them all Procrastinating: Putting off a task until success is virtually impossible Cheating: Presenting others’work as one’s own Using alcohol or drugs: Taking substances that will inevitably reduce performance, • It might seem paradoxical that learners who want to be successful would actually try to undermine their own success. But if they believe they’re unlikely to succeed no matter what they do—and especially if failure will reflect poorly on their intelligence and ability—they increase their chances of justifying the failure and thereby protecting their self-worth
