MOTIVATION: ISSUES AND EXPLANATIONS
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An internal state that arouses, directs, and maintains behaviour. Five questions
 1. What choices do people make about their behaviour?
 2. Having made a decision, how long is it before the person actually gets started? Why do some students who choose to do their homework start right away, while other procrastinate?
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3. What is the intensity or level of involvement in the chosen activity?
Once the book bag is opened, is the student absorbed and focused or just going through the motions?
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4. What causes a persist or to give up? Will student read entire
Shakespeare assignment or just few pages?
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5. What is the individual thinking and feeling while engaged in the activity? Is the student enjoying Shakespeare or worrying about upcoming test?

INTRINSIC & EXTRINSIC MOTIVATION
TRAITS AND STATE
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Personal traits or persistent individual characteristics. Have a need to achieve, a fear of tests, or an enduring interest in art galleries
 Other psychologists see motivation more as a state , a temporary situation.
 Motivation we experience at any given time usually is a combination of trait and state.
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Intrinsic motivation is the natural tendency to seek out and conquer challenges as we pursue personal interests and exercise capabilities. Do not need incentives or punishment, because the activity itself is rewarding .
 “what motivates us to do something when don’t have do to anything”

INTRINSIC &EXTRINSIC MOTIVATION (cont’.)
 The difference between the two types of motivation is the student’s reason for acting, that is whether the locus of causality for the action
(the location of the cause) is internal or external - inside or outside the person.
 Activity is based on personal interests (internal locus of causality/intrinsic motivation), or because someone or something else is influencing them ( external locus of causality/extrinsic motivation).
 Our activities fall along a continuum from fully self-determined
(internal locus of causality/intrinsic motivation) to fully determined by others (external locus of causality/extrinsic motivation)

Teachers can...
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In school, both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation are important.
 Can create intrinsic motivation by stimulating the students’ curiosity and making them feel more competent as they learn. But this won’t work all the time.
 There are situations when incentives and external supports are necessary.
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Must encourage and nurture intrinsic motivation while making sure that extrinsic motivation supports learning.
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Need to know about the factors that influence motivation.

FOUR GENERAL APPROACHES TO MOTIVATION

M.
IS A VAST and complicated subject encompassing many theories.
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Examination of the field will be selective
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Behavioural Approaches to
Motivation. Behaviourists explanation M. with the concepts such as “reward” and
“incentive”
 A Reward is an object or event supplied as a consequence of a particular behaviour that we think is attractive
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An incentive is an object or event that encourages or discourages a person’s behaviour.
 If we’re consistently reinforced for certain behaviours, we may develop habits or tendencies to act in certain ways.
 Providing grade, stars, ..for learning - or demerits for misbehaviour - is an attempt to motivate students by extrinsic means of e incentives, rewards, and punishments.

HUMANISTIC & COGNITIVE APPROACHES TO
MOTIVATION

People are continually motivated by the inborn need to fulfill their potential.
 To motivate students means to encourage their inner resources
- their sense of competence, self-esteem, autonomy, and self-actualization.
 Reflection of this perspective is the “self-esteem movement,” a controversial approach to meeting students’ needs for dignity and self-esteem
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Cognitive approaches .
Behaviour is determined by our thinking, not simply by whether we have been rewarded or punished for the behaviour in the past.
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Behaviour is initiated and regulated by plans, goals, schema, expectations, and attributions.
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People respond not to external events or physical conditions like hunger, but rather to their interpretations of these events.

SOCIAL LEARNING APPROACHES TO
MOTIVATION
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Integration of behvioural and cognitive approaches:
 - Behaviourists’ concern with the effects or outcomes of behaviour
 - Cognitivists’ interest in the impact of individual beliefs and expectations.
 Social learning theorists’ explanations of M. as
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Expectancy X value theories
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This means that M. is seen as the product of two main forces:
 The individual’s expectation of reaching a goal and the value of that goal to him or her.
 Motivation is a produc of these two forces, because if either factor is zero, there is no motivation to work toward the goal.

Behaviour, Cognitive, S. L. Approaches to M.
These theories B., H., C., and S.L. approaches to
M. differ in their answers to the question “What is motivation? But each contributes in its own way toward a comprehensive understanding of human motivation.