0.1 Motivation  (Page 3/7)

Cautions about behavioral perspectives on motivation

The use of reinforcements can backfire if a teacher relies on rewarding behaviors that she alone has chosen, or even if she persists in reinforcing behaviors that students already find motivating without external reinforcement. Instead of serving as an incentive to desired behavior, reinforcement can become a reminder of the teacher’s power and of students’ lack of control over their own actions. A classic research study of intrinsic motivation illustrated the problem nicely. In the study, researchers rewarded university students for two activities—solving puzzles and writing newspaper headlines —that they already found interesting. Some of the students, however, were paid to do these activities, whereas others were not. Under these conditions, the students who were paid were less likely to engage in the activities following the experiment than were the students who were not paid, even though both groups had been equally interested in the activities to begin with (Deci, 1971). The extrinsic reward of payment, it seemed, interfered with the intrinsic reward of working the puzzles.

In another study, early adolescents studying nutrition topics were told that learning the material would enhance either their physical appearance, an extrinsic goal focus, or health, an intrinsic goal focus (Vansteenkiste, Simons, Lens, Soenens,&Matos, L., 2005). Those students focusing on the extrinsic goal did better on tests of rote learning while those focusing on the intrinsic goal did better on conceptual learning. In other words, extrinsic goals appear to promote superficial strategies such as memorization, while intrinsic goals seem to enhance deeper learning (Vansteenkiste, et al., 2005).

Many studies have confirmed these effects in numerous situations, though they have also found certain conditions where extrinsic rewards do not reduce intrinsic rewards. Extrinsic rewards are not as harmful, for example, if a person is paid “by the hour” (i.e. by a flat rate) rather than piecemeal (by the number of items completed) (Cameron&Pierce, 1994; Eisenberger&Cameron, 1996). They also are less harmful if the task itself is relatively well-defined (like working math problems or playing solitaire) and high-quality performance is expected at all times. So there are still times and ways when externally determined reinforcements are useful and effective. In general, however, extrinsic rewards do seem to undermine intrinsic motivation often enough that they need to be used selectively and thoughtfully (Deci, Koestner,&Ryan, 2001). As it happens, help with being selective and thoughtful can be found in the other, more cognitively oriented theories of motivation. These use the goals, interests, and beliefs of students as ways of explaining differences in students’ motives and in how the motives affect engagement with school.

Self-efficacy

In addition to being influenced by their goals and interests, students’ motives are affected by specific beliefs about the student’s personal capacities. In self-efficacy theory the beliefs become a primary, explicit explanation for motivation (Bandura, 1977, 1986, 1997). Self-efficacy is an individual’s belief that he/she is capable of carrying out a specific task or of reaching a specific goal. Note that the belief and theaction or goal are specific. Your self-efficacy is your beliefs about whether or not you can write an acceptable term paper, for example, or repair an automobile, or make friendswith the new student in class. These are relatively specific beliefs and tasks. Self-efficacy is not about whether you believe that you are intelligent ingeneral, whether you always like working with mechanical things, or think that you are generally a likeable person. These more general judgments are betterregarded as various mixtures of self-concepts (beliefs about general personal identity) or of self-esteem (evaluations of identity). They are important in their own right, and sometimes influence motivation, but only indirectly (Bong&Skaalvik, 2004).