Motivating Students to Learn
Posted by Dr. John Brian Anthony
Introduction
Motivating students to learn: understanding the concept of motivation and what parents and teachers can do to increase children’s motivation to do well academically.
What is the problem?
Parents and teachers all around the globe are pulling their hair out trying to understand why students seem less and less interested in school and school work. It used to be that the parent’s job was simply to outfit the child for school and get him there and ensure that homework was neatly done. The teacher’s job was to present the information and guide the students through the exercises. Those do not seem to work anymore.
Both teachers and parents have to constantly come up with new strategies to ensure good academic performance of the students. It seems that they even have to resort to bribes sometimes.
Perhaps part of the problem is the lack of understanding of what really motivates students. Motivation is a difficult concept to define or explain. Motivation is generally understood as what arouses and sustains a particular behaviour.
Types of motivation
However, it is agreed that, for school purposes at least, there are two types of motivation- the extrinsic motivation and the intrinsic motivation.
- Extrinsic motivation usually derives from external rewards- prizes, grades, tokens and wanting to do better than others. This leads to students performing solely for these rewards or to avoid shame or embarrassment.
- Intrinsic motivation comes from within. When a student is driven to do well for his own self-satisfaction in developing a skill, then the learning is more meaningful and long-lasting.
When do you give motivation?
Motivation is optimized when :
· The person engages in the task for his own reason rather than in response to external pressure.
· The task is of appropriate level of challenge.
· There is sufficient choice.
Setting Up Learning Environment
How can parents and teachers set up learning environments to optimize these conditions? The answer to this question is wide and varied. Specific strategies could depend on various cultures and environments. But the following general principles must be applied:
1. The pressure on the student must be minimized, for example, remove the competition or social comparison; revise the grading system.
2. Ensure that the task is of an appropriate level of challenge for the student’s age and ability level. If it is too easy the student will be bored and un-motivated. A level of difficulty above the student’s ability could lead to frustration and giving up.
3. The task should also be meaningful and relevant to the learner. Students often comment “Why do I have to learn about….. I’ll never use this when I grow up!” The aim of the task should be to improve or gain some skill rather than rote memorization of irrelevant facts.
4. Appropriate use of rewards. Use praise liberally. Reward for effort and improvement and not just for performance.
5. Provide choice. Students will be more motivated to engage in a task if they have some say in what the task is, how it is to be carried out and presented. The more controlling the teacher is the less motivated the learner will be.
6. The structure of the learning exercise affects the level of motivation. There must be clear instructions given . The student must be sure of what is expected of him. Guidelines on how the task is to be performed must be specific and well understood. Immediate and useful feedback are crucial. A promptly returned assignment with comments indicating where the student went wrong and how he could improve is much more useful than a paper with only a B or C grade on it.
7. A supportive environment is a must. Students,( or anyone for that matter) do not perform or think well when they feel invalidated or threatened. The rapport that parents and teachers develop with the student must be one of ease and comfort-an encouraging word or tone of voice, a hand on the shoulder. These may seem to be trivial but the impact on the learning is great.
Conclusion
In short, when students are treated well, respected, encouraged and the work has meaning high levels of motivation will automatically develop.
Parents are the best learning partner for children and their interaction should explain meaning for the children experience and expand the child’s knowledge through probing question. The parent can select what meaning to give their children of their children experience through mediation.
Popularity: 4% [?]
Related posts:
- History teaches great lessons – but only to those who want to learn from it. Posted by Paul Tan Proud to be a Malay Singaporean...
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
Comments
11 Responses to “Motivating Students to Learn”
Leave a Reply
-
-
Total Hits
Inspirational word from gkm2020
I seems you have stated common sense into reality very clearly.
Most of the general principles listed above appear to be out of control by parents and students themselves.
So, how would we instill the intrinsic motivation i.e. to excel in education into students and parents in general?
Some students compete with the excellence level that is to get all A for all subjects taken, not to outperform classmates (although position in class does show your performance relative to others’).
P/S: Is there a way to edit comments once posted? Sometimes typo-errors.
yeah..it should be ‘learning from experiences and mistakes’ mode. Students will be self-satisfied and feel self-rewarded after being able to discover things on their own or solving problems in their own ways. It teaches the students to be more independent and highly self-motivated at the same time.
Will hardship in the long house such as bumai, nangkal, etc. cause and generate intrinsic motivation to excel?
Or will informing and educating the persons about the importance of education itself cause and generate intrinsic motivation to excel?
“I’ll make you believe!”
Motivation and hypnosis: DIY shrink.
If kids can be motivated automatically upon careful guidance, respect then you are closer to validate what deemed to be a long search of one magic tool in education: hypnotise the kids. Motivation and hypnosis is brothers in arm. Just like bank finance officer and ah long, they both operate on same modus operandi: be my slave, you bonkers! So all of you out there, the so-called motivational speakers and the variation everywhere from evangelist leaders, self-glorified stock market gurus, feng shui doomsayers, morning show preachers, you all got kids to straighten up.
Motivation and hypnosis is both dealing with mental block, or in this case for kids that is easily feel de-motivated. Why some kid just badly demotivated, say, failed to solve some maths and that’s it I’m doomed, I’m going to work as Trienekens bin collector for the rest of my life? This is where professional hypnotists aka motivational speakers do the trick and wonder with one simple words used by shrink traditionally as: “I’ll make you believe!”
A good example is on sports. Look at how Fabio Capello turned England football stars from the brink of self-destruct. Many might say that Capello using a no-nonsense, strict regime in training and turning these oftenly over-hyped stars into one combative and composed unit that winning all their World Cup qualifying matches so far with plenty of goals. Nope, Capello merely unlock their mental block, as he said when he first arrived puzzled by how low they can performed for their own country compare with their club performance. Financial gain understandably not on their radar but the stars, individually good players, simply don’t click together. Capello is right: problem of mental block.
Kids at school facing the same thing, almost a disease called mental block. Proper guidance, respect is just part of this but do not constitute it as automatic motivation yet. Another important last remaining puzzle is to hypnotise the kids. Remove the fear factor like the fear for math difficulty. Ask the kid, when you play your PS2 game GTA, how you get the car from the owner? I wait a bit, whack the guy and sped of with his busty girlfriend. Haha. So how bad you wanna whack this math, boy? So you show him just how easy it can be done. Set an objective, step on the process and if he stall on the process, find the thing that block the answer. A good math teacher is the one that can identify the blocking part that most students face and struggled with. Here, the teacher must console his students with clear and concise way to solve the equation. He must able to feel the students’ fear and anxiety(the mental block), all the way to the solution. That is hypnosis in broad terms.
Of course not many teachers, parents possess this skill but it can be acquired. It’s almost a gift, that’s why some people born with it and came with it, well, the abuse. Con artist, traditional healers, political strategist, to name a few that rely on their hypnotic rhetorics to make people believe in them. That’s why you hear things like I married a wrong man, Gosh! we elected a lunatic prophet as president, I feel funny and foolish after planted this fruit called palm oil, I swear on this longhouse that Dayaks are originated from Taiwan natives, my vodka feels like langkau after I got it as a gift but feels jolly rummy, I know your Phd from some polynesian Fiji island university is bogus but you did that one great talk, bravo!
Dyaks – you stand corrected. My Ohd is not from some polynesian Fiji island university – or bogus my friend. You have put every thing in one pot. My Phd is from Southern Cross University, Brisbane, Australia.I studied under IMCA guide and my Supervisor is Prof Mohd Sail. of Uni-Putra Malaysia from Community and Peace Department. My viva-voce is done by Prof Philip Wrights at UPM in Nov 2003. Sorry to disappoint you for trying to put a tag on me as being bogus. Actually, you can be in trouble for writing the wrong information on personal issues.
Dyaks, it’s very unbecoming of you to be very personal with your comment on Dr. John Brian. I think that is not right for us to be emotional. Let’s not have a personal attack on someone whom we do not know personally. Please put your facts right first before you do it. Reference has been given by Dr. John, make a point to ascertain the facts that you have stated, before you get yourself in trouble, which I think it can be very costly for you!
I didn’t say Dr.John a bogus. Period.
“Both teachers and parents have to constantly come up with new strategies to ensure good academic performance of the students. It seems that they even have to resort to bribes sometimes.” Dr.John
As rightly noted, education bribery is real and sick culture. Those parents who can afford it of course will just pay and bail their kid to get the degree, especially when studying abroad with public perception is always unsuspecting of oversea degree holders. Buying a degree is no big deal nowadays, just like buying yourself a Datukship. Only that it’ll become evidence once the person with fake degree for sure will never perform when dealing in actual working environment. It’s a competitve world out there so some will buy their degree to get promoted or boasting their hollow CV, some with great public speaking and hypnotic-like skills surely make their fake degree even more believable. That was exactly what my remarks meant in earlier comment. Fake degree holders with hypnosis skills can only be a dangerous mix.
Education bribery often derived from family with deep-rooted corruption culture. When either parents live their life on bribes money, one of the way to siphoned out the filthy cash is thru their children’s education, mostly on foreign university/college. It become worse when their kids themselves are not excelled in their study so spare the tought for bright one that is as good as receiving govt scholarship for being outright smart. Now for the not-so-bright kids study oversea, what the parents can do to salvage the kid? You guess it right: just pay for the degree and bring back their kid home as newly ‘graduated’ student.
What could possibly goes wrong here?
Dyaks
Since hypnosis is very subjective, pls give us the steps to do hypnosis.
Some answers to why students are not motivated to learn:
- Lack of meaning of what they learned. Education today, no longer emphasis on meaning, it is all memory based, well, true as far as Malaysian education system is concerned. For the students ‘I memorise, I answer questions in exam then I can forget about what I’ve learned’. Why did this happened? Because classroom teaching no longer teach the meaning of learning. As such, to the students, it’s all about my ability to memorise for grades in exam instead of (for example): ‘What is ratio? When do I apply ratio in my life? How is ratio useful in our life? What’s the similarity and difference between ratio and percentage? Can I identify ratio when it is used?
- Students have the mentality of being helpless. More often than not, we hear this for student ‘it’s boring’. The psychology behind this phrase is helplessness. ‘I can’t bring myself to learn, someone else have to motivate me to learn’. And in comes the parents…’if you score A, I’ll give you RM50 for each A you score’. Unknowingly, this motivation to learn cycle becomes vicious cycle instead of a virtuous cycle. Why? Because parents encourage helplessness. The motivation to learn is not based on values and principles. e.g. In virtuous cycle, ‘I must score well in exam to earn a tertiary degree to bring pride to my family’. In vicious cycle, ‘I must score well in exam to earn my dad’s RM500′. When the very same student grows up and steps out to work, the values ingrained in him from the vicious or virtuous cycle will determine his course in life e.g. values from vicious cycle being helpless ‘It is all my client’s fault that I lost his sale’ compared with values from virtuous cycle ‘Where did I go wrong in this sales? What can I do to make sure the same mistake won’t happen again? what lessons did I learn from this experience that I must change’.
- Lack of values and principles. Parents and school do not instill the values and principles for learning. More often than not, the paradigm is, if the child goes to school, he’ll learn how to learn. If this is true, then we should not see all the problems in motivation to learn. Students do not know what action should they perform in order to learn because they do not know the values and principles. What has values and principles got to do with learning? Values and principles tell us rules e.g. ‘thou shall not bring shame to the family’. If the student knows the principle in the example, he’ld be able to tell himself ‘I must pass my exam because I cannot bring shame to my family, so I’ll make all efforts to master the topics that I’m poor in’. The student knows how to act because he knows the principles. The student’s action comes from internal realisation , not external threats or rewards.
- No contextual meaning in the subject learned. Almost all students read and speak fluently. So, if he knows how to read and speak fluently, that means he understands what he reads and speaks about. False. Contextual meaning is almost non-existence in most students. Reading and speaking are mere ability to pronounce accurately and nothing more. Contextual meaning has to be built and that’s the job of the adult. For example: ‘bird flies’. What’s the contextual meaning? ‘Bird is a type of animal that use the action of flying to move from one place to another place’. Without adult’s intervention to make this relationship explicit for student, student will not get the contextual meaning from what he reads.
The answers above are based on the author’s view being an firm believer in meaningful education. The approach written are based on the Dayakbaru’s topic ‘motivating students to learn’. What is motivation? Let’s understand the meaning of motivation. Motivation is the reason(s) for a person to do/achieve something.
In a nutshell, parents don’t have to be rich to motivate students to learn. No need to bribe, no need to hire tuition teachers. Whether you like it or not, modern days’ parents/teachers resort to these two elements to motivate students to learn. Everything about motivating students to learn starts from home.
It sounds good lakkia. R U an educationist?