Module 15 Blog Post 1

The main idea of the chapter was the focus on keeping students intrinsically motivated and staying away from extrinsic motivation.  It’s important for students to learn to engage in an activity because there are interested and enjoy the activity and not for rewards and other outcomes that extrinsically motivate them to do the work.  If parents rely on extrinsic motivation for children at an early age they may be promoting lower academic intrinsic motivation.  Extrinsic motivation is not very necessary for younger children because they tend to be natural explorers that are curious and motivated to learn new things. The chapter talks about rewards and praise and the ways to effectively use them.  Task-contingent rewards are not as beneficial as positive performance feedback and performance contingent rewards, which are rewards that give feedback on the how they completed the work.  It’s important for teachers to make rewards go along with the quality of their work and minimize the use of authoritarian style.  Praising students for learning is more effective for elementary students because they realize the right type of behaviors to engage in while many times high school students seem to take it as an indication of low-ability.  Information praise includes process praise and performance praise, which help students understand how they did and what to do for next time.  It’s important as a teacher to make praise specific to the behavior being enforced and be sincere with praise. The flow theory is a way in which the reward is the activity itself.  Flow theory describes individuals who are motivated to engage in activity for its own sake.  For flow to happen an individual must have the right amount of challenge but also must not be bored with the material. 

What is a positive way to use praise and rewards in a first grade classroom that doesn’t undermine intrinsic motivation?

Video games are intrinsically motivating because the activity itself is what is motivating to the individual engaging in the video games. The extrinsic factor at play is the activity itself as the reward, ultimately making video games an intrinsically motivating activity because individuals engage in this activity for their own sake of enjoyment.