Theories of Motivation
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Motivation
• Motivation- an inner states that arouses,
directs, and maintains a person’s behavior.
It is broken down into psychological need,
environmentally activated states, and a set
of cognitions and beliefs.
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Motivation as a Psychological Need
• Maslow proposed a hierarchy of needs.
• Made distinction between deficiency needs and growth needs.
• Deficiency needs- (physiological, safety, love and esteem) are critical to physical
and psychological well being
• Being needs- a need to know and understand things, to appreciate beauty, or to
grow and develop an appreciation of others, can never be satisfied completely.
• Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
• Physiological needs
• Safety needs
• Love needs
• Esteem needs
• Need to know and understand
• Aesthetic
• Self-actualization needs: becoming everything that one is capable of becoming
• Maslow argues lower-level needs must be at least partially met before
higher-level needs can be achieved.
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Intrinsic versus Extrinsic
Motivation
• Researchers have found that children have a need for competence, autonomy, and mastery
and this serves as the foundation for intrinsic motivation.
• Intrinsic motivation- internal sources such as curiosity, interest, enjoyment, and innate
strivings for mastery and growth.
• Extrinsic motivation- arises from external contingencies such as a reward, earn a high
grade, please someone, etc.
• Extrinsic motivation can cause reduced feelings of competence and self-determination
because they see their behavior as controlled by external rather than internal causes.
• Examples:
• A student is reading a novel because he really loves to read.
• During a test prep activity, the teacher offers a piece of candy for every correct answer.
• Grades and points
• Volunteering at a soup kitchen
• Externally imposed reward systems are appropriate for students who are not interested in a
subject. If a student already has a passion and desire for a subject it is best to leave them
alone or you could undermine their motivation.
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Motivation and Attribution Theory
• Attributional theory: examines how individuals interpret their
successes and failures in achievement situations.
• We explain our success and failures three ways: first as internal
or external; second as stable or unstable; and third if it is
controllable or not.
• People try to maintain a positive self-image
• When we do well in an activity we are likely to attribute our
success to our own efforts and ability (internal); but when we
fail we believe it is due to factors in which we had no control.
• When students succeed, they want to believe that it is
because they are smart, not because they are lucky or the
task was easy. Students who fail, like to believe they have
bad luck (external factor), which allows for the possibility of
succeeding next time.
• Attribution is a self-preservation tool
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Attributional Theory in the Classroom
• What teachers attribute their students successes to is
important:
• When teachers attribute student failure to lack of ability
they tend to not expect as much from the student; when
teachers believe students have high ability they tend to
have higher expectations which makes the student more
motivated.
• Pygmalion in the Classroom (Rosenthal and Jackson)
• Tested students “academic ability”
• Gave results to teacher labeling students as high ability,
average ability, or low ability.
• Students expected to do well by their teachers had larger
gains than students expected to not do so well.
• This is a classic example of “self-fulfilling prophecy”- when
a teacher’s expectations lead to students achievement 6that
conforms to those expectations.
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Behaviorists on Motivation
• Believe differences in motivation are explained
by an individual’s desire to gain reinforcers.
• Believe to change a child’s motivation the
appropriate rewards and incentives should be
used.
• Example: Telling your class “If everyone quietly
works and finishes their reading you will get a
bonus point.”
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Self-Regulated Learning
• Self-regulated learning: learning that results from students’
self-generated thoughts and behaviors that are systematically
oriented toward their learning goals.
• Students who are highly motivated to learn something are
more likely to plan their learning, carry out a learning plan, and
retain the information.
• This motivation can come from several places:
• Social modeling- seeing other students use self-regulated
strategies
• Goal-setting- students are encouraged to establish their own
learning goals
• Feedback- shows if students are making progress towards
their goals
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Motivation as a Set of Cognitions and
Beliefs
• Expentancy-value theory: It has been found that students’
expectations and values are strongly related to a wide range of
achievement behaviors, including task choice, persistence, and
performance.
• This theory implies that people’s motivation to achieve
something depends on their perceived probability of
success and the value they place on success.
• Motivation (M)= Perceived probability of success (Ps) x
Incentive value of success (Is)
• An important part of this formula is that it is
multiplicative, if people believe that their probability
of success is zero or if they do not value success, then
their motivation will be zero.
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How Can Achievement
Motivation be Enhanced?
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Motivation and Goal Orientations
• Goal theory: emphasize students’ reasons for choosing, performing and
persisting at various achievement activities.
• Two types of goals:
1. Learning-oriented goals- engaging in learning activities because
you want to learn something new, develop skills or master an
activity
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Motivation and Goal Orientations
1. Performance-oriented goals- engaging in a learning activity to
compete; students feel successful when they receive the best
grade or do well, because it implies high ability.
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Students who focus on ability to perform show learned
helplessness (no matter what one does, one is doomed to
failure).
• Students who focus on intrinsic goal prefer challenging tasks so
they can learn; performance-oriented students avoid these tasks
because it may make them appear incompetent.
• Learning-oriented students will ask for help; those who are
performance-oriented will cheat or have others solve problems
for them.
• Learning-oriented students engage in active learning strategies
(reviewing material, checking comprehension) while
performance-oriented students use superficial learning
strategies (memorization).
How teachers can promote learning-oriented goals (pg 249)
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Motivation and Self-Efficacy
• Theorists have also emphasized self-efficacy, people’s
judgements of their ability to perform a task given the skills
they possess and the context.
• Self-efficacy affects people’s choice of activities, effort
and persistence.
• We tend to engage in tasks in which we have a high
sense of self-efficacy and avoid tasks which we have
low self-efficacy.
• Self-efficacy is task contingent- depending on the task we
evaluate our skills differently.
• We do not necessarily want high self-efficacy but rather an
accurate self-efficacy.
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Individual Differences in
Achievement Motivation
• Ability differences- we have different perceptions of our abilities.
• Entity theory of ability: ability level is fixed and cannot be
improved.
• Incremental theory of ability: believe they can improve their ability
by investing greater effort.
• Those who have an entity theory of ability tend to have performanceoriented goals.
• While those with incremental theory of ability tend to have learningoriented goals.
• Those who are highly motivated probably have: an incremental
theory of ability, learning-oriented goals, and an accurate selfefficacy.
• Having these traits allows one to take on a task, set goals, outline a
course of action, persist in the face of failure, and to maintain
behavior.
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As a teacher, how can I enhance
my students’ motivation?
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Enhancing Intrinsic Motivation
• Arouse Interest- it is important to convince students of the
importance and interest level of the material being taught, if
possible show how the knowledge will be useful to them.
• Maintain Curiosity-A skillful teacher uses a variety of means to
arouse or maintain curiosity. Creating an element of surprise and
challenging the students’ current understanding can make them
intensely curious about an issue
• Use a Variety of Interesting Presentation Modes- Teachers can
maintain student interest by alternating use of films, guest
speakers, demonstrations, and so on. However, the use of each
resource must be carefully planned to be sure it focuses on the
course objectives and complements the activity.
• Help Students Set Their Own Goals- A fundamental principle of
motivation is that people work harder for goals that they
themselves set than for goal set for them by others.
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Providing Extrinsic Incentives
to Learn
• Not every subject is intrinsically interesting to all students, below is a variety of
incentives that can help motivate students to learn academic material.
• Express Clear Expectations- Students need to know exactly what they are supposed to
do, how they will be evaluated, and what the consequences of success will be. Often,
students’ failures stem from confusion about what they are being asked to do.
• Provide Clear Feedback- Feedback is information on the results of one’s efforts.
Feedback can serve as an incentive; but to do so it must be clear and specific and must
be given close in time to performance. Specific feedback is informative and
motivational; it tells students what they did right so they continue to do it.
• Provide Immediate Feedback- In order for feedback to be effective it needs to happen
as close as possible to the performance.
• Provide Frequent Feedback- Feedback should be delivered frequently to students to
maintain their best efforts.
• Increase the Value and Availability of Extrinsic Motivators- Students must value
incentives that are used to motivate them. According to expectancy theory, although all
students must have a chance to be rewarded if they do their best, no student should
have an easy time achieving the maximum reward. It is important to reward students
for effort, for doing better than they have done in the past, or for making progress.
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