Motivation in schools: factors and applications

Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Motivation in Schools

"Do students Care About Learning?"

"What Engages Underachieving Middle School Students in Learning?"

"Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Motivation in Schools: A Reconciliation"

In "Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Motivation in Schools: A Reconciliation," Martin V. Covington argues that both approaches can be effective if done well, and do not necessarily have to be incompatible. In his evaluation of the literature, he found that other factors, such as how interested the student is in the work, how successful they feel, affect student effort. He also found that the extrinsic reward of a good grade increased intrinsic motivation. He recommended a grading practice that compared each student's performance to a set standard, rather than grading on a curve, can increase intrinsic motivation.

In "Do students Care About Learning?" Marge Scherer interviewed author Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi regarding his book about youth and the world of work. The participants reported eight times a day how much they enjoyed what they were doing at the moment. Willingness to work hard on something one didn't particularly enjoyed correlated with doing well in high school. he found differences between more affluent and poorer students, that test scores often do not correlate with success in life, and that students showed great capacity to change over time. This doesn't mean that more empirical research is a waste of time but only that teachers need well thought-out, practical approaches that have some connection to best practices to help them solve the more difficult problems they face in their classrooms.

In "What Engages Underachieving Middle School Students in Learning?" Mike Muir looked at six students and analyzed how they felt they learned best, noting that positive extrinsic motivation helped but that threats of negative results interfered, that the students liked hands-on activities but were not ready to skip book-based learning completely, and that they preferred work where the content seemed important in some way to them.

There were some common elements throughout all three articles. All three articles talked about what motivated students. Covington's looked at this very specifically, but all three authors noted that often extrinsic motivation was necessary. In addition, all three authors looked to students for at least some of the answers to their questions. Covington noted that why a student wanted a good grade made a difference in how much effort the student put out. When the student only wanted to please others, less effort was made than when the student wanted to please him or herself. Csikszentmihalyi looked at the issue a little differently and noted that how interested the students were in an activity made a big difference. Students were most interested in extra-curricular activities and academically-based activities that included a high-interest factor, such as computers. He found that overall, history tasks generated the least amount of interest. Muir noted that one way to increase the effort in unerachieving students was to increase how interesting the task was for the students.

This should not surprise teachers, because teachers have themselves chosen to follow their interests. People don't go into teaching because they will make lots of money; they go into teaching because teaching interests them, appeals to them, and draws them to it. At both the junior high and senior high levels, teachers specialize in certain subjects, and they pick the subjects that interest them most. This is true of college students generally according to Covington as well as common sense: college students very often complain about meeting their core requirements, and some can argue quite persuasively that they should not be made to take humanities courses when they're going to be business majors. Theatre majors may complain about being required to take math. As soon as they can. they start taking the courses offered in their major area, where once again they choose the courses of most interest to them. A history major with a particular interest in medieval history may avoid taking any more modern history courses than required but seek out extra courses from earlier times instead. It would be interesting to look at college students' transcripts, comparing gpa's for core course with gpa's in the students' majors.