ASCD Infobrief:Student Engagement:Motivating Students to Learn - 0 views
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Although research attests that students are most likely to be engaged in learning when they are active and given some choice and control over the learning process—and when the curriculum is individualized, authentic, and related to students' interests—surveys of classroom practices reveal that instruction emphasizing student passivity, rote learning, and routine is the rule rather than the exception (Goodlad, 1984; Yair, 2000).
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What is student engagement? According to Fred Newmann, author of Student Engagement and Achievement in American Secondary Schools (1992), engaged students make a “psychological investment in learning. They try hard to learn what school offers. They take pride not simply in earning the formal indicators of success (grades), but in understanding the material and incorporating or internalizing it in their lives” (pp. 2–3). According to this definition, an engaged student is one who is intrinsically motivated to learn—that is, motivated from a desire for competence and understanding, or simply from a love of learning, rather than a desire for a good grade, a teacher's approval, or acceptance into a good college.
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For example, humans are driven by a need to achieve competence (Newmann, Wehlage, & Lamborn, 1992), and their beliefs or expectations about their ability to perform certain tasks successfully influence future learning. When learners perceive that they have been successful at an endeavor, they are more likely to be motivated to learn in the future and to persist when faced with a difficult task; conversely, when learners have a history of failure, it becomes difficult to sustain the motivation to keep trying (Anderman & Midgley, 1998).
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