Excerpted from Snowman/Biehler, PSYCHOLOGY APPLIED TO TEACHING, © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

Definition of Motivation

Behavioral Views of Motivation

Cognitive Views of Motivation

The Impact of Cooperative Learning on Motivation

Suggestions for Teaching in Your Classroom: Motivating Students to Learn

Applying Motivation to Project Based Instruction

Definition of Motivation

Motivation is typically defined as the forces that account for the arousal, selection, direction, and continuation of behavior. Nevertheless, many teachers have at least two major misconceptions about motivation that prevent them from using this concept with maximum effectiveness. One misconception is that some students are unmotivated. Strictly speaking, that is not an accurate statement. As long as a student chooses goals and expends a certain amount of effort to achieve them, he is, by definition, motivated. What teachers really mean is that students are not motivated to behave in the way teachers would like them to behave. The second misconception is that one person can directly motivate another. This view is inaccurate because motivation comes from within a person. What you can do, with the help of the various motivation theories discussed in this chapter, is create the circumstances that influence students to do what you want them to do.

Many factors determine whether the students in your classes will be motivated or not motivated to learn. You should not be surprised to discover that no single theoretical interpretation of motivation explains all aspects of student interest or lack of it. Different theoretical interpretations do, however, shed light on why some students in a given learning situation are more likely to want to learn than others. Furthermore, each theoretical interpretation can serve as the basis for the development of techniques for motivating students in the classroom. Several theoretical interpretations of motivation -- some of which are derived from discussions of learning presented earlier -- will now be summarized.

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Behavioral Views of Motivation

Operant Conditioning and Social Learning Theory

The Effect of Reinforcement In Chapter 8 we discussed Skinner's emphasis of the role of reinforcement in learning. After demonstrating that organisms tend to repeat actions that are reinforced and that behavior can be shaped by reinforcement, Skinner developed the technique of programmed instruction to make it possible for students to be reinforced for every correct response. According to Skinner, supplying the correct answer--and being informed by the program that it is the correct answer--motivates the student to go on to the next frame; and as the student works through the program, the desired terminal behavior is progressively shaped.

Following Skinner's lead, many behavioral learning theorists devised techniques of behavior modification on the assumption that students are motivated to complete a task by being promised a reward of some kind. Many times the reward takes the form of praise or a grade. Sometimes it is a token that can be traded in for some desired object; and at other times the reward may be the privilege of engaging in a self-selected activity.

Operant conditioning interpretations of learning may help reveal why some students react favorably to particular subjects and dislike others. For instance, some students may enter a required math class with a feeling of delight, while others may feel that they have been sentenced to prison. Skinner suggests that such differences can be traced to past experiences. He would argue that the student who loves math has been shaped to respond that way by a series of positive experiences with math. The math hater, in contrast, may have suffered a series of negative experiences.

The Power of Persuasive Models Social learning theorists, such as Albert Bandura, call attention to the importance of observation, imitation, and vicarious reinforcement (expecting to receive the same reinforcer that we see someone else get for exhibiting a particular behavior). A student who identifies with and admires a teacher of a particular subject may work hard partly to please the admired individual and partly to try becoming like that individual. A student who observes an older brother or sister reaping benefits from earning high grades may strive to do the same with the expectation of experiencing the same or similar benefits. A student who notices that a classmate receives praise from the teacher after acting in a certain way may decide to imitate such behavior to win similar rewards. As we pointed out in Chapter 8, both vicarious reinforcement and direct reinforcement can raise an individual's sense of self-efficacy for a particular task, which, in turn, leads to higher levels of motivation.

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Cognitive Views of Motivation

Cognitive views stress that human behavior is influenced by the way people think about themselves and their environment. The direction that behavior takes can be explained by four influences: the inherent need to construct an organized and logically consistent knowledge base, one's expectations for successfully completing a task, the factors that one believes account for success and failure, and one's beliefs about the nature of cognitive ability.

The Impact of Cognitive Development

This view is based on Jean Piaget's principles of equilibration, assimilation, accommodation, and schema formation. Piaget proposes that children possess an inherent desire to maintain a sense of organization and balance in their conception of the world (equilibration). A sense of equilibration may be experienced if a child assimilates a new experience by relating it to an existing scheme, or the child may accommodate by modifying an existing scheme if the new experience is too different.

In addition, individuals will repeatedly use new schemes because of an inherent desire to master their environment. This explains why young children can, with no loss of enthusiasm, sing the same song, tell the same story, and play the same game over and over and why they repeatedly open and shut doors to rooms and cupboards with no seeming purpose. It also explains why older children take great delight in collecting and organizing almost everything they can get their hands on and why adolescents who have begun to attain formal operational thinking will argue incessantly about all the unfairness in the world and how it can be eliminated (Stipek, 1993).

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The Impact of Cooperative Learning on Motivation

Classroom tasks can be structured so that students are forced to compete with one another, work individually, or cooperate with one another to obtain the rewards that teachers make available for successfully completing these tasks. Traditionally, competitive arrangements have been assumed to be superior to the other two in increasing motivation and learning. But reviews of the research literature by David Johnson and Roger Johnson (Johnson & Johnson, 1995; Johnson, Johnson, & Smith, 1995) found cooperative arrangements to be far superior in producing these benefits. In this section we will describe cooperative-, competitive, and individual learning arrangements (sometimes called goal structures or reward structures), identify the elements that make up the major approaches to cooperative learning, and examine the effect of cooperative learning on motivation, achievement, and interpersonal relationships.

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Suggestions for Teaching in Your Classroom: Motivating Students to Learn

1. Use behavioral techniques to help students exert themselves and work toward remote goals.

2. Make sure that students know what they are to do, how to proceed, and how to determine when they have achieved goals.

3. Do everything possible to satisfy deficiency needs -- physiological, safety, belongingness, and esteem.

a. Accommodate the instructional program to the physiological needs of your students.

b. Make your room physically and psychologically safe.

c. Show your students that you take an interest in them and that they belong in your classroom.

d. Arrange learning experiences so that all students can gain at least a degree of esteem.

4. Enhance the attractions and minimize the dangers of growth choices.

5. Direct learning experiences toward feelings of success in an effort to encourage an orientation toward achievement, a positive self-concept, and a strong sense of self-efficacy.

a. Make use of objectives that are challenging but attainable and, when appropriate, that involve student input.

b. Provide knowledge of results by emphasizing the positive.

6. Try to encourage the development of need achievement, self-confidence, and self-direction in students who need these qualities.

a. Use achievement-motivation training techniques.

b. Use cooperative-learning methods.

7. Try to make learning interesting by emphasizing activity, investigation, adventure, social interaction, and usefulness.

Two sources of information on motivation techniques and suggestions for teaching are found at Columbia University's Institute for Learning Technologies, which contains documents, papers, and unusual projects and activities that could be used to increase student motivation; and at Northwestern University's Institute for Learning Sciences Engines for Education on-line program, which allows educators to pursue a number of questions about students, learning environments, and successful teaching through a hyperlinked database. The Institute for Learning Technologies is found at http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/. The Institute for Learning Sciences is found at . http://www.sesp.northwestern.edu/ls/info/overview/.

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Applying Motivation to Project Based Instruction

Blumenfeld and her colleagues have described how incorporating long-term projects into classroom instruction helps to engage students in the solving of "authentic" problems and increases students' investment in classroom learning. Their work offers a comprehensive overview of the components of learning, motivation and instruction which need to be taken into consideration by teachers when involving students in project-based learning. These include:

a) Create opportunities for learning by providing access to information.
b) Support learning by structuring instruction and modeling and guiding students to make tasks manageable.
c) Encourage students to use learning and metacognitive processes like questioning, debating, and constructive argument.
d) Assess progress, diagnose problems, provide feedback, and evaluate results.

The authors also discuss the implications for teachers and how they can find support for incorporating project-based learning and how they can stay motivated when working on projects. In sum, their work provides teachers with a solid outline of the components of project-based instruction and the elements that are crucial to successful projects.

See the Blumenfeld article in Educational Psychologist , v. 26, nos. 3 & 4, pp. 369-398, 1991.

For more information on motivation -- see Orlich et al, TEACHING STRATEGIES, Houghton Mifflin Co.

For more information on motivation relating to integrating technology -- see Grabe/Grabe INTEGRATING TECHNOLOGY FOR MEANINGFUL LEARNING, Houghton Mifflin Co.