Michelle Fife

Annotated bibliography
February 17, 2015

Motivation in Elementary Schools

I believe learning is enhance when students are interested in what they are learning. My main
goal as an educator is to impact students inside and outside the classroom. I believe when
students are self-motivated they learn best. Therefore, as a teacher it is extremely important to
me to know how to increase students motivation and self-efficacy in the classroom. Therefore,
the following six articles discuss how to increase students motivation in the classroom setting.

1)
Margolis, H., Mccabe, P. (January 01, 2006). Improving self-efficacy and
motivation. Intervention in school and clinic, 41, 4, 218-227.

The purpose of this article is to give a variety of different strategies on how to increase
self-efficacy and self-motivation amongst struggling learners. Margolis states that many
struggling learners have low self-efficacy and because of this avoid academics and give up easily
when presented with difficult tasks. She suggests that there are three main factors that contribute
to a students self-efficacy. The first one being, enactive memory; which is a students ability to
remember past successes and failures. Margolis argues that its extremely important to give
students challenging work, but work that is within reach of the proximal zone of development, so
that they may be successful. The author then goes on to talk about various experiences, and how
providing students with direct guidance on how to do a task will aid struggling students learns
the steps to complete a task successfully. The article then talks about verbal persuasion. By

providing students with positive feedback and encouraging words this will help to increase
motivation in students.
This article is pertinent to my teaching, as there will always be students who struggle and who
are unmotivated. It is essential as a new teacher, that I have strategies on how to engage and
increase my students self-efficacy. I will do this by tailoring lessons to meet all students
abilities. I will also make sure that the work I expect from my students is within the reach of their
proximal zone of development.

2) Palmer, S. B., & Wehmeyer, M. L. (March 01, 2003). Promoting Self-Determination in Early
Elementary School: Teaching Self-Regulated Problem-Solving and Goal-Setting Skills. Remedial
and Special Education, 24, 2, 115-26.

This article discusses how to improve student motivation in the early elementary grades.
The author argues that self-determination skills such as: goal setting, decision making and
problem solving need to be taught earlier. She believes that the earlier we teach selfdetermination skills to students the better they will be at setting goals and good decision making.
The author states that goal setting can be used in the early grades by simply getting students to
draw pictures of what they like to do at home and at recess, then explaining that goals are
something you set out to do. She also believes that exposing students to choices, both good and
bad, will help them to make better choices. This article is relevant to my teaching practice as I
think it is important at a young age to provide students with strategies to set goals, problem solve
and make good decisions. This article is similar to that of Banduras (an article we read in
Education Psychology) as he talks about the importance of students setting their own goals
instead of the teacher, as goals set by ourselves are more motivating.

3)

Schunk, D. H., & Zimmerman, B. J. (January 01, 2007). Influencing Children's Self-Efficacy and
Self-Regulation of Reading and Writing Through Modeling. Reading & Writing Quarterly, 23, 1,
7-25.
This article looks at how motivation plays a role in mastering literacy skills. The author
quickly talks about how a childs skill set is not the only variable that comes into play when
learning to read, and that motivation also plays a large role in literacy. The author suggests that
providing students with successful models can play a large role in increasing motivation. The
idea is, that in the early stages of learning, students benefit from observation models. Even more
so, students are inspired to perform a task when they see someone similar to them be successful
or model the skillset of becoming successful. The article also talks about how peer feedback and
encouragement can aid a student to perform a task. However, it is important to not get a student
to perform a task that is out of their zone of proximal development as the motivation will be
short lived when they are not successfully able to perform the task. This article is extremely
relevant to any elementary teacher that will be teaching English. As it is helpful to know how
modeling and peer feedback increases a students desire to learn language arts.
4)
Covington, M. V. (2000). Intrinsic Versus Extrinsic Motivation in Schools A Reconciliation.
Current Directions in Psychological Science, 9(1), 22-25.
This article defines two different types of motivation in school: extrinsic and intrinsic
motivation. The article explains extrinsic motivation as: motivation by receiving a reward such
as: good grades or gold stars. This type of motivation is often unrelated to actions and it just a
means of completing the work to gain a reward. Compared to intrinsic motivation which is when
a student engages in an activity for their own sake. Even though, the article describes two types
of motivation, it argues that intrinsic motivation is more beneficial because the student is doing
the work not for a reward but for themselves which promotes: personal growth, welling being
and goal setting. The article then examines a study that looks at how the results showed that
students, who engage in work because of their own self were more involved in their work and
able to take on more difficult tasks. When extrinsic motivation was applied and the reward was
taken away or no longer given the students were less likely to complete the task and they became

less motivated to complete future work. The article concludes that the best way to engage
students in school is to tailor your lesson plans to their interests and to try incorporating things
that students are involved in to self- motivate them. This article is pertinent to any teacher in the
education system who wants to increase motivation amongst their students.

5) Miller, S. D., & Meece, J. L. (May 01, 1997). Enhancing Elementary Students'
Motivation to Read and Write: A Classroom Intervention Study. Journal of
Educational Research, 90, 5, 286-99.
According to research, reading for pleasure has decreased among students. This article
examines how different reading and language assignments can increase students motivation in
language arts. The study included 187 students and 8 teachers. For the purpose of the study the
teachers modified their English assignments by allowing the students to have more time to write,
to collaborate with peers and monitored their students work more frequently. Results showed that
students were less focused on grades and simply getting the task done. Instead they were more
involved in the activity especially when it was of interest to them and when they were given a
choice
The article also discussed helping students set goals for themselves and how there are three
different types of goals. The Task mastery goal is defined as having a desire to learn something
new or improve preview skills. Ego-Social goals are when a students main priority is to
outperform other students. Work avoidance goals are when your goal is to simply just finish the
work without thinking or putting in much effort. All three of these goals can motivate students
to complete a task or their work. However, research has showed that motivation is more
powerful when students are completing their work because they are seeking to further their
knowledge or learn something new.
The main point of this article is to help students try to set personal goals about their work and to
increase their knowledge instead of trying to create goals based on competing for grades. This
can be done by having activities and work that are appealing to students, giving them more time
to complete tasks as well as giving them frequent feedback and encouragement

This article is extremely useful as a teacher as it is important to help your students set personal
goals for their learning. Its also useful to know how to avoid setting goals that involve
competition or simply trying to get the work down.

6)
Nichols, J. (January 01, 2006). Empowerment and relationships: A classroom model
to enhance student motivation. Learning Environments Research, 9, 2, 149-161.

This article looks at how in the 1800s and sometimes even today we promote a negative
relationship between the teachers and students. This happens when teachers think they should
hold all the power and make all the decisions; this is done by creating competition among
students, by giving rewards and punishments and lastly by giving challenging work that is not
attainable to the students. The main focus of this article is how to change the negative
relationships into positive relationships between students and teachers by implementing the
learner centered model.
The article explains that we can create positive relationships with students by: 1) having a
classroom environment that is flexible and open to new ideas, instead of shutting down the ideas
of students 2) Providing students with a more hands on experience and 3) having a classroom
that encourages socialization and communication among peers. When positive studentteacher
relationships are encouraged and nourished this promotes high self-efficacy and as well as
motivation.
This is an important article because it addresses how we need to create positive relationships
with our students as well as how creating an environment where we encourage many different
solutions to a problem will help to keep students motivated.