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anonymous

Sociocultural Theories of Motivation | Education.com - 2 views

  • instructional environments found in the home and in the classroom. These studies provided detailed accounts of the way that students' regulation of their own thinking processes originated in the negotiation of goals and norms among students, teacher, and families. These studies were important because they identified the source of motivation as the relationships that students developed. This included relationships with school activities and relationships with the many other participants in school learning. Therefore, motivating classroom learners meant helping them coordinate the goals implied by a range of different relationships, and recognizing that some of the goals will conflict with other goals. This implies that before searching for strategies to motivate individual learners, teachers need to help students learn to negotiate worthwhile goals for themselves and their classmates. In doing so, teachers need to acknowledging the influence of other goals which might interfere with classroom learning, but which have real value for students.
  • “motivation in context” had emerged as an important theme among motivation researchers.
  • According to Gee (2004), the abstract generalizations that are taken for granted in modern cognitive perspectives come at the end of a long process of socially situated activity—if they come at all. Because of this, situative theorists believe that students' learning is strongly attached to their participation in the construction of situated knowledge in socially meaningful activity.
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  • While continuing to give ample treatment to motivational strategies that focus on individual learners, many also point out that teachers need to help the classroom community negotiate worthwhile goals, acknowledging that the students themselves help create and change these very goals.
  • the widely held distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation was too crude to be of much use in developing intentional learning environments. Both of these seminal considerations of situated learning suggested that the motivational strategies from earlier individually oriented theories of motivation might actually interfere with efforts to motivate engagement in situated learning. Given that situative theorists consider all learning to be socially situated, situative perspectives on learning seemed to have profound implications for motivating classroom learning.
  • Hickey and McCaslin (2001) also described the basic tension between earlier behavioral and cognitive views of motivation. As illustrated by the seemingly intractable debate over extrinsic incentives (e.g., prizes, competition, and grades), they argued that these tensions were a major obstacle to educational reform. Reflecting their very different views of learning, cognitive theorists have long argued that incentives interfere with natural learning processes, while behavioral theorists have long argued that incentive are useful for encouraging learning. Hickey and McCaslin argued that a relatively neutral situative view of motivation might offer a more useful lens for studying and comparing behavioral and cognitive strategies for motivating engagement. From a situative perspective, incentives and competition are not inherently good or bad. Rather, all motivational practices should first be analyzed in terms of their impact on students' success at negotiating meaningfulness of the language and concepts of the particular academic domain. Importantly, a situative theory of motivation assumes that the success of these negotiations is the primary source of individual motivation towards the domain. Therefore it is the collective success of these negotiations that predicts whether or not those individuals will be motivated to engage in the practices of the domain in the future.
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    Dan Hickey's article on different models of motivation - proposing that socio-cultural and situative approaches are more appropriate than individual-based models.
anonymous

Education Week: 'Digital Badges' Would Represent Students' Skill Acquisition - 2 views

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    skeptics argue that introducing digital badges into informal education settings-where most agree they would have the greatest impact initially-could bring too much structure and hierarchy to the very places students go to seek refuge from formal achievement tracking. And many point to research that suggests rewarding students, with a badge for instance, for activities they would have otherwise completed out of personal interest or intellectual curiosity actually decreases their motivation to do those tasks.
anonymous

Harvard Education Letter - 2 views

shared by anonymous on 02 Feb 12 - No Cached
    • anonymous
       
      The blurb that sent me to the article said this... "Researchers involved in four studies say they can predict which students may be leaders as adults based on the behaviors and experiences of their youth. Factors found to be predictive of future leadership included the tendency to engage in response to a new situation and an inner motivation to try new things and gain skills. The studies suggest teachers encourage leadership skills in students by allowing them to pursue mastery and success through real-life experiences, rather than relying on rewards such as test scores and classroom prizes." I didn't see all of that in the article, however.
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