| Motivation and Personality, Expectations and Applications of Theory |
Motivation and Personality.The concept of motivation as a personality characteristic can describe a general tendency to strive for certain types of goals. Though motivation tends to remain constant across a variety of settings, it may be an alterable characteristic. In the same way, locus of control can be a relatively stable personality characteristic, though students may have an internal locus of control for some activities and an external locus of control for others. Other motives that may be viewed as personality characteristics include achievement, affiliation, power, and approval motivations. Students with "learning goals" sec the purpose of school as pining knowledge and competence, as opposed to those with "performance goals" who tend to value positive judgments and good grades. Learned helplessness is a perception that a person is doomed to failure, despite his or her actions. Achievement motivation and attributions can be altered by special programs designed for this purpose. Motivation and Expectations.Expectancy theories of motivation hold that a person's motivation to achieve something depends on the product of that person's estimation of his or her chance of success and the value he or she places on success. Motivation should be at a maximum at moderate levels of probability of success. In educational settings the most important implication of this theory is that students' tasks should be neither too easy nor too difficult. Research on teachers' expectations lot their students has generally found that students do tend to live up to the expectations their teachers express for them, so that it is important for teachers to communicate to their students a positive expectation that they can learn.
Applications of Motivation Theory.An incentive is a reinforcer that people can expect to receive if they perform a specific behavior. Some researchers have shown that extrinsic rewards for an intrinsically interesting activity may undermine students' interest, though some form of extrinsic reward is generally needed to motivate students to do their best on school tasks. The use of instructional sets can enhance intrinsic motivation. Other methods include arousing curiosity, using interesting and varied presentation modes, and games and simulations. The principles of effective use of incentives for learning include clear expectations; clarity and immediacy of feedback; frequency of assessment, feedback, and reward; value of rewards; and availability of rewards. Classroom rewards include praise, which is most effective when it is contingent, specific, and credible. Feedback can serve as an incentive if it is clear and specific and given close in time to performance. Grades serve as evaluations, feedback, and incentives. A fundamental principle of motivation is that people work harder for goals they themselves establish than for goals set by others. A general method of rewarding effort is to recognize students' improvement over I their own past record. One such specific method is Individual Learning Expectations I (ILE), based on the idea of recognizing students for doing better than they have done j in the past. This method employs quizzes, initial base scores, improvement points, feedback to students, certificates or other small rewards, recomputation of base scores, and improvement points in addition to grades. Competitive goal structures have been criticized on the basis that they discourage students from helping each other to learn. Cooperative learning methods, on the • other hand, have students work in small, mixed- ability groups and cooperate with one another to learn academic material. Student Teams—Achievement Divisions is a method of cooperative learning consisting of mixed-ability groups, a regular cycle of teaching, cooperative study, and quiz, with recognition or other rewards to teams whose members most exceed their own past records. Tags:
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