The Importance Of Motivation In Education

Everyday people are faced with tasks that demand effort and persistence. Many researchers find themselves collecting data on students in a variety of different contexts. Every researcher would like to be able to find large, representative, and highly motivated samples of students; however in reality finding such samples of students is difficult. Even in the most active assessment colleges there will be students that just tolerate taking different assessments rather than embracing them and trying to do the best they can on each one. In recent years standardized testing has been the preferred method of evaluating student achievement, however there is more to student learning than just performing well on a standardized test (Anderman 2003). Motivation plays an important part in the life of a student, and having the desire to do well will not only help in school but in life.

Motivation however is not the easiest thing to measure, and not all people are motivated by the same things. Researchers attempt to solve this problem by running their experiments and using various incentives that they believe will affect the participants in their studies. There have been numerous studies done on what motivates people to do the things they do that ranged from when money was used as an external reward (Deci, 1971) to simply praising a student for the effort that they put forth and not solely on the completion of the task (Hallinan, 2008). Many studies done also used survey’s for a self-reported measure of motivation, however prior studies have found that self-reported motivation is higher on employment tests among job applicants than incumbents (Arvey, 1990), and among eighth grade students paid for correctly answering questions compared with stud...

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...g of the experiment and would have to give part of the reward back to the experimenter for each question they answered incorrectly. We would use a between subjects design where the framing of the incentives is the manipulated or independent variable. We propose that we will find that the group that participants in the negatively framed condition will perform better on the test than the positively framed condition group. Prior studies have been conducted on this subject of incentive framing and results have shown that positively framed incentives are less motivating then negatively framed ones and this was shown across multiple experiments that Goldsmith and Dhar ran. Just like in the first experiment I ran, the participants in Goldsmith and Dhar’s experiments predicted incorrectly that a positively framed incentive would motivate more than a negatively framed one.