Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Intrinsic Motivation Blog Prompt 2

Self-efficacy is an expectation that we are capable of performing a task or succeeding in an activity, which influences our motivation for the task or activity. In order to be motivated, we must have high outcome and efficacy expectations. In the scenario, Hannah is described to feel learned helplessness because she feels that she is not competent in doing the problems that the teacher is demonstrating. Since she believes that she is incompetent, she has no motivation to even try. In order to help Hannah succeed, instead of constantly going over the problem with her and trying to make her participate in the problem solving discussion it may be helpful to split the class into groups that demonstrate different types of learning. Therefore, Hannah will not feel pressured to do work completely on her own and she can observe her classmates solving the problem in different ways. This way, Hannah may find that one specific classmate is helpful in the way he or she solves the problem. Increasing Hannah's motivation requires her to be able to complete small tasks successfully and receive praise for these tasks. If this is done, than Hannah will be more motivated and confident to do specific math problems that she had no motivation to do before. If Hannah's motivation is increased, than she will have an increased self-efficacy as well. The teacher needs to have outcome expectations for Hannah as well, which are beliefs that particular actions that lead to particular outcomes, which would be success. If the teacher is confident that Hannah can succeed, than Hannah will believe that she can succeed herself as well.

Other ways that the teacher can enhance Hannah's intrinsic motivation are capitalizing on interest and relevance, providing realistic choices of tasks, teaching skills necessary for success, focusing on master, helping Hannah set appropriate goals, providing appropriate feedback, limiting external constraints n teaching, and fostering relatedness. All of these techniques can help increase Hannah's intrinsic motivation and self-efficacy, which will ultimately help Hannah succeed int he class as well.

1 comment:

  1. I like your suggestions here and I think they're very likely to work in a classroom! I particularly like how you brought in issues of relevance and interest. Especially in her case, once you prompt her to do a task that she's passionate about, she might turn into a completely different kind of student, and you could definitely build off of that.

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