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Motivating Students- Part 1.

© Marilyn Robb

Motivating Students- Part 1.

One of the issues that could be affecting the educational reform efforts may have to do with the motivation of students to achieve. Students come to the class with differrent levels of motivation.

However in order to address the issue of motivation we must be able to define and understand the concept. It has been difficult to define motivation. Good and Brophy (1990) describe motivation as "...a hypothetical construct used to explain the initiation, direction and intensity and persistence of goal-directed behaviour". Samual Ball (1977) states that " this term motivation is usually defined by psychologists as the processes involved in arousing, directing and sustaining behaviour". Further, Kozeki and Entwistle (1984) identified nine dimensions of motivation in education in three domains- affective, moral and cognitive. They explain that the overall motivation will depend on "relations with others (affective domain), developing competencies in knowledge and skills (cognitive domain) and the feelings of satisfaction derived from living up to the expectations of self and others (moral domain).

Motivation clearly is a part of a web of factors determining behaviour and involving many processes. In considering motivation we must take into account the motives or feelings in that person that are important for learning in school. These include anxiety,curiosity, the need to achieve,motives of self-expression and self-enhancement, affiliative needs (for social relationships) and physiological drives (hunger, thirst,etc.)

Attempts to improve motivational levels of students must therefore consider: * the feelings of the students

* how the classroom factors (especialy teacher practices) affect these feelings.

* whether these feelings will arouse, direct and sustain behaviour that leads to learning.

The subsequent parts to this series will continue to look at these aspects of motivating students and explore strategies for motivating students to achieve.

References.

1. Ball, S. ed.(1977) Motivation in Education. Academic Press Inc. New York.

2. Good, T.L. and Brophy, J. (1990) Educational Psychology. A realistic approach. (4th ed. ) Longman, New York.

3. Kozeki, B. and Entwistle, N. (1984) Identifying dimensions of school motivation in Britian and Hungary. Britisih Journal of Educational Psychology, 54:306-319

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