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Home News & Diary School Blog

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Motivating students.

Home News & Diary School Blog

08 Feb 2019

Uncategorized

Motivation affects how pupils approach school, how they relate to their peers and their teachers and how much effort they put into their studies. Even though motivation can be difficult to measure or define, there are two largely accepted types of motivation: extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. The former refers to desire to achieve something because it will yield a specific result, whereas the latter refers to the desire to do something because one takes pleasure from doing something or sees value in it.

There are 4 dimensions which need to be met for motivation to increase:

  1. Competence: the student believes that they can complete the task.
  2. Control/autonomy: the student feels in control by seeing a direct link between his or her actions and an outcome and retains autonomy by having some choice about whether or how to undertake the task.
  3. Interest/value — The student has some interest in the task or sees the value of completing it.
  4. Relatedness — Completing the task brings the student social rewards, such as a sense of belonging to a classroom or other desired social group or approval from a person of social importance to the student.

For the full report see this excellent summary here:

https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED532666.pdf

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