Introduction
Children’s motivation to excel in school starts to decrease in first grade. As students are more aware of their performance in comparison to their peers and academic content becomes less appealing, student intrinsic motivation suffers (Edmunds & Tancock, 2003, p. 18). Teachers are continuously looking for ways to motivate their students to read more. A popular strategy is providing students with incentives or extrinisic rewards. Previous studies proved that these incentives do not affect student motivation to read and “undermine intrinsic motivation,” (Edmunds & Tancock, 2003, p. 18). Despite evidence that these reward programs do not encourage a love for reading in students, many school districts implement these types of programs. School districts are finding more success when providing access to a variety of books and have incentives directly relate to reading are proven more successful with keeping students motivated.
Kathryn M. Edmunds and Susan M. Tancock wanted to study this topic further and try and understand the best strategies to increase interest and motivation to read. In the article Incentives: The Effects on the Reading Motivation of Fourth-Grade Students, Edmunds and Tancock attempt to uncover if incentives unrelated to reading, incentives directly related to reading or no incentives at all will help motivate fourth grade students to read.
Summary of Study
By sampling six fourth grade classes in the same school in a southern American state, Edmunds and Tancocktested their hypothesis. The pair used two classes as the control group, two classes as a treatment group that received extrinisic rewards that were not relavant to language arts. These three groups helped researchers test their hypot...
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...apricipants in this study already used a program to help students improve in reading, Accelerated Reader Program and that could be affecting the results. The study could yield better results if the researchers repeated the same study, but no longer used the Accelerated Reader Program. Conducting the study with the same framework to test motivation based on rewards would allow researchers to see if the Accelerated Reader Program was a motivator initself.
The conclusion of the study is a reminder for all educators to continue to developing their strategies and techniques to motivate students in the classroom. Not all students learn the same way and not all strategies will motivate students. The biggest takeaway of this study is the reminder that educators should expand their practice and consider multiple approaches to help students become life long learners.
Servilio, K., L (2009).You get to choose! Motivating students to read through differentiated instruction. Teaching exceptional children plus, 5(5), 2-11.
Ever since I began my teaching career, I have been fascinated with the topic of motivation and the role it plays in student learning. Daniel Pink’s book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, has been on my personal reading list for a couple of years now, and I was elated to find that it was one of the recommended books to read for this assignment. I have often wondered why some of my students, and even one of my own children, are more internally driven than others to complete a given task. Now that I am in the process of becoming a school administrator, my curiosity about what motivates adults has been heightened, as well. In the hopes of finding some insight, and perhaps the answers to some of my burning questions, I finally picked up Daniel Pink’s book and began reading.
Slavin, R., Cheung, A., Groff, C., & Lake, C. (2008). Effective reading programs for middle and high schools: A best-evidence synthesis. Reading Research Quarterly, 43(3), 290-322.
“Motivation is a complex part of human psychology and behavior that influences how individuals choose to invest their time, how much energy they exert in any given task, how they think and feel about the task, and how long they persist at the task” (Urdan & Schoenfelder, 2006). The biggest question educators face in today’s classroom is what motivates a student to do something and why? Virtually all students are motivated in one way or another. Research of student motivation suggests a theory that emphasizes a social-cognitive perspective. The cognition of students regarding academic work are influenced by social factors, such as messages from the teacher about the difficulty of the task, the perceived abilities of classmates, and the information about the importance of learning the material (Urdan & Schoenfelder, 2006). In this paper the focus will primarily be on those elements within the classroom that influence student motivation and engagement.
Turner, J., & Paris, S. G. (1995). How literacy tasks influence children�s motivation for literacy. The Reading Teacher, 48(8), 662‑673. Available October 17, 2002, from Professional Database Collection database: http://search.epnet.com/
Many researches have been conducted to investigate what motivates students for better academic performance and whether it has a correlation with achievement motivation.
Keller, John M. (2006). What Are the Elements of Learner Motivation? Retrieved July 4, 2011
Teachers are able to set clear goals for learning and relate that learning to the needs of the students therefore motivating the intrinsic learner. While teachers should predominately use intrinsic motivators in their classrooms extrinsic motivators do have their place in motivating the extrinsically orientated student. Extrinsic motivators though should be used with caution as students will only ...
“The importance of reading to children is their ability to grasp abstract concepts, apply logic in various scenarios recognize cause and effect, and utilize judgement.” (Stan, n.d.) Reading helps with concentration and discipline. Which not only helps them in school but allows them to make better choices in everyday situations. Pie Corbett did his own research and discovered that “children were at risk of being left behind at school and failing to develop the creative talents needed to lead happy and productive lives.” If parents were told this, they might make better parental
In order to test this hypothesis I will go to a grade 3 foundation phase classroom, at a public school in Soweto, which has a group of 45 learners from diverse backgrounds. For the first three weeks in the school I will observe learners while I use praise and reward strategies listed in the table below to motivate my learners while teaching and giving feedback in the classroom. For the following three weeks I will observe learners while using encouragement strategies listed on the table below to motivate learners. For the four weeks after I will use both strategies and then give feedback on which strategy kept learners motivated longer and why. This study will be conducted to better understand how encouragement rather than the praise and reward system, better serves as means to motivate learners in the foundation phase classroom.
While I believe every child is a reader, I do not believe every child will be enthralled with reading all the time. All students have the capability to read and enjoy reading, but just like any other hobby, interest will vary from student to student. The students in my classroom will be encouraged in their reading, be provided with choice, taught how books can take you into another world but, my students will not be forced to read. This paper will illustrate my philosophy of reading through the theories I relate to, the way I want to implement reading and writing curriculum, and the methods I will use motivate my students to read and help them become literate.
It is first important to understand how motivation works in the classroom. There are infinite procedures teachers use to achieve desired effects from their students, but there are general patterns these motivational tools follow. In order for teachers to communicate with their students, they must identify with their needs on an individual basis (Gawel, 1997). This proposal is much akin to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, which states five basic needs that must be met in order to achieve full motivation. These needs, in ascending order, are as follows: physiological, security, love and belongingness, esteem and self-respect, and self-actualization (Gawel, 1997). Each of these needs details a very important issue in motivation inside the classroom and out.
Student motivation can be affected by several factors. These elements include parent involvement, teacher enthusiasm, rewards, peers, the learner’s environment, personal experiences, personal interests of the student, and self-esteem and self-image.
One contributing factor towards student success is student motivation. Motivation is reading unassigned books out of class that relate to the class subject matter, just to expand his or her knowledge. The need or want type of actions a persons’ mentality is, to reach a personal goal or objective of some sort. People’s motivational purpose in school can range from, higher earning potential, more job stability, greater benefits, and even just to gain more knowledge. In a YouTube video entitled “The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us” by Dan Pink, he suggests that three elements: purpose, mastery, and autonomy play a part towards true motivation. Autonomy is ones self-drive, while
To a certain extent it can be said that without a sense of motivation, whether it be intrinsic or extrinsic, a child’s ability to learn and reach their potential is greatly lessened. Motivation is best described as an internal state that not only arouses and directs behaviour but also helps to maintain it (Woolfolk & Margetts, 2013). Motivation not only plays a large role in a child’s learning ability, it also shapes a student’s interests and enjoyment of school and study (Martin, 2003). For both pre-service teachers and expert teachers it is easy to see that if a student possesses high motivation to learn, their behaviour towards their school work is more positive and in turn leads to higher academic success, whereas a student with little to no motivation will exhibit negative behavi...