Encouraging student motivation.

February 26,2016
 Amotivation and achievement motivation
 Motives and behaviour
 Measuring student motivation
 The development of motivation
 Encouraging student motivation
 practice

 Please, indicate your single main reason for studying

at university:
 Means to an end

 Improving standard of living

 Improving chance of getting a job
 Developing career
 Getting a good qualification
 Getting a worthwhile job
 Personal development

 Improving life skills

 Reaching personal potential
 Gaining knowledge for its own sake
 Furthering academic interest
 Gaining control of own life
 Being classified in this way
 Stopgap

 Avoiding work
 Laziness
 Allowing time out to decide on career
 Social life
 Fun and enjoyment
 What is motivation?

 Motivation is the thoughts and feelings which make

us want to and continue to want to do something and
which turn our wishes into action.
 Motivation can be divided into two different theories
known as Intrinsic (internal) motivation and Extrinsic
(external) motivation
 Intrinsic (internal) motivation

 Intrinsically motivated students enjoy a challenge,

want to master the subject, are curious and want to
learn
Extrinsic (external) motivation

 extrinsically motivated students are concerned with

the grades they achieve, external rewards and
whether they will gain approval from others.
 Amotivation

 Amotivated students are those who do not really

know why they are at university, think themselves
incompetent and feel that they have little control
over what happens to them. In a real sense, then,
these students show an absence of motivation.
(stopgap motivation)
 Achievement motivation

 achievement motivation is a measure of the strength

of motivation, rather than of its direction.A student
who is high in achievement motivation is seen as lying
at the opposite end of the scale from an amotivated
student.
 Motives and behaviour

 Motivation is a theoretical construct used to

explain behavior. It represents the reasons for
people's actions, desires, and needs. A motive is
what prompts the person to act in a certain way, or at
least develop an inclination for specific behavior.
Measuring student motivation

There are three most important dimensions thought to influence

motivation:
1)The academic motivation scale developed by Vallerand et al. (1992)
which are designed to assess types of intrinsic and extrinsic
motivation, and amotivation. It can be used in educational research.
2)The motivated strategies for learning questionnaire developed by
Pintrich et al.(1993) is a much longer scale. And it is US-oriented and
thus far seems to have not been used in some countries.
3) The study process questionnaire originally developed by Biggs (1999)
contained three factors (surface, deep and achieving, with achieving
approach ). This version is extremely practical for use in learning and
teaching contexts.
Encouraging student motivation

 Lecturers frequently bemoan the lack of student

motivation .
Question:
Is intrinsic motivation desirable or extrinsic motivation?
Intrinsic motivation is desirable more extrinsic motivation.
Hence these are the two principal questions that will be
addressed in this section:
1) How can we avoid students amotivated?
2) How to encourage intrinsic rather than extrinsic
motivation?
For some students this will be next to impossible, since
they may have entered higher education with the sole
aim of enjoying the social life. But there is also evidence
that what we do to students at university can lead to
their becoming amotivated andstudents lose their
motivation.
One group of students approached essay writing with an
understanding motivation (very similar to deep approaches to
studying), in that they enjoyed writing, had an intrinsic
interest in the essay, and read extensively in order to develop
their own conclusions in response to the essay title. Because
of the amount of reading they did, and their relative
inexperience as writers, they often had problems focusing
their essay, developing arguments that adhered to academic
conventions including writing within the word limit. As a result
they received poor marks but had difficulty in understanding
where they had gone wrong.
It is only part of the answer to this problem, but it would
appear that one way of avoiding amotivation is to make sure
that students are given full and appropriate feedback.
how to encourage intrinsic rather
than extrinsic motivation.

There is much evidence to suggest that the majority of

students tend to adopt surface approaches (of which
extrinsic motivation is a part) at university. There is
some evidence to suggest that changes at a course level
may be effective.
 Ramsden’s course experience
questionnaire measures five
subscales:

1) good teaching (providing useful and timely feedback, clear

explanations, making the course interesting and
understanding students);
2) clear goals and standards (clear aims, objectives and
expectations regarding standard of work);
3) appropriate assessment (extent to which assessment
measures thinking and understanding rather than factual
recall);
4) Appropriate workload (the extent to which workloads
interfere with student learning);
5) generic skills (extent to which studies have supported the
development of generic skills).
There is one other aspect of higher education which does
seem to be crucially important in students’ motivation, and
that is the assessment system.
 Samira Mammadova

Thanks for attention…