A student's attitude goes a long way in determining motivation. Experiencing success will often increase motivation while being unsuccessful has a tendency to decrease motivation. Some students nay be seen as lazy when the true problem is lack of motivation due to hardships or struggles with the content. The teacher could even be the reason for the lack of motivation. For example, if a teacher prejudges a student based on his/her previous performance, the student may feel unsuccessful and believe there is no reason to try because he/she always gets things wrong. For this reason, educators should apply an equity principle to all students. In other words, teachers should believe every student can be successful regardless of any previous performances.
Prior knowledge is highly linked to motivation. Could this be influenced by the student's confidence level? I believe this to be a part of the reason. When we feel confident in our ideas, we are more likely to become engaged in the topic. This principle applies to every facet of our lives, not just education. We tend to be more interested in the things we know we can do well.
Motivation is influenced by these three things: 1) personal identity 2) content knowledge and 3) past experiences. Teachers are often the key in instigating motivation. He/She should look at each student on a personal level and consider the types of things the student has been exposed to and has prior knowledge about. Find out where the students' interests lie and try to make connections to these interests in the classroom. Connections should also be made to the real world. Students need to see how content is relevant to their own lives. Other important issues for teachers are to make sure there is a balance between competition and cooperation, use engaging activities such as hands on projects and role playing,and acknowledge efforts made by the students. Educators must also create a supporting environment that encourages risk-taking and learning from mistakes.
Students must activate what they know to learn something new. Teachers play a key role in this process. Teachers should model enthusiasm for learning and arouse the students' curiosity. The prior knowledge should be connected to the lesson being presented and must be deeper than simply asking the students what they know about the topic. Teachers must also model strategies and teach the students how to use them as well as how to determine when to use each strategy. Anticipation guides are a good tool to use for teaching students how to brainstorm. Predicting is also very useful for engaging students' interests. The PReP strategy seems to me to be geared more towards older students. CORI is another strategy useful for arousing curiosity, promoting social interaction, and encouraging engagement. It allows the students a sense of freedom to choose various resources such as videos, books, and experiments.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I see your point completly about the equity principle. I truly believe that this prinicple should be used all the time by every teacher. Sadly, this is not always the case. We sometimes unfortunatley see this in our clinicals. I believe that some of our students we are tutoring are victims of be treated unequally.
ReplyDeleteI disagree that the PReP strategy is for older students. I think it would be very easy for a teacher to use this strategy with younger students. It seems that this could be done as a simple class discussion. Younger students can very easily tell a personal story about a topic. This will allow the teacher to find out if the students are on the right track about a topic.