Personal Reflection on Chapter 9 (Motivation and Self Regulation in Learning)
I loved reading about motivation and self regulation in learning, especially because
when working with college students the vast majority have already decided on a
field of interest and it is less challenging to explain academic concepts and character
competencies relevant to their particular field of interest. Like McClelland and
Atkinson too, I’ve always wondered why some students strive for excellence and
others don’t. I too think it has a lot to do with family expectations. However, I always
strived to earn top scores and be the best in my class, but my brother never cared
about anything besides basketball and we were both raised with the same family
expectations. Reading about self-efficacy gave insight as to why I may have “kept at
it” while my brother struggled until he found his college major, 6 years into school,
Health and Exercise Science. I thought Keller’s model of sustaining motivation
(ARCS) was great and simple and see how it can be adapted to work in individual
and large classroom settings. I was especially pleased to see the idea of assessment
at the “final” stage of designing motivation strategies because it’s a never ending
cycle, especially when working with new students each year.
APA Website Reference
Five key ingredients for improving student motivation. Research in Higher Education
Journal. Retrieved June 27, 2012, from
http://www.aabri.com/manuscripts/11834.pdf
Website Discussion/Opinion
This article details the “ingredients” and analyzes the “audiences” in order to
improve student motivation. The five key ingredients are: student, teacher, content,
method and process and gives a bit more detail about the background sources for
motivation that a student might have. The article even addresses the “consumer and
provider” relationships that is often referred to in college (sometimes students are
considered customers). On the instructor side, I found it interesting that in
assessment a difference in instructor degree (MA/PhD) didn’t change effectiveness,
but students performed better if they were 1) educated in smaller schools where
they were well known, 2) have smaller class sizes, 3) receive challenging
curriculum, and 4) have instructors with greater experience and expertise.
APA Research Article Reference
Cheung, E. (2004). Goal Setting as Motivational tool in Student's Self-regulated
Learning. Educational Research Quarterly, 27(3), 3-9.
Research Article Discussion/Opinion
This article discusses the idea of goal setting as a tool for enhancing the selfregulated learning process in college students. Cheung compares the idea of goal
setting to that in real world business management and studies to see if it is an
appropriate motivational tool for college students. 78% of the 182 participants
returned the survey instrument and 79.1% indicated that goal setting helps them
achieve better results in this course, but surprisingly only 18.7% expected to
achieve an “A”, 56% expected a “B”, 23.6% expected a “C”, and 1.6% expected a “D”.
However, there was a positive relationship between those that expected a higher
grade tended to score higher in graded work. Cheung says there are three
components that determine how students “pre-rate” themselves and their
expectations: 1) their personal understanding of perceived skills and ability, 2) prior
knowledge of the subject matter, 3) related skills in the subject.