2.2 Motivation: goal-setting  (Page 3/8)

How can teachers do so? One way is to allow students to choose specific tasks or assignments for themselves, where possible, because their choices are morelikely than usual to reflect prior personal interests , and hence be motivated more intrinsically than usual. The limitation of this strategy, of course, is that students may not see some of the connectionsbetween their prior interests and the curriculum topics at hand. In that case it also helps for the teacher to look for and point out the relevance ofcurrent topics or skills to students’ personal interests and goals.

Suppose, for example, that a student enjoys the latest styles of music. This interest may actually have connections with a wide range of school curriculum,such as:

• biology (because of the physiology of the ear and of hearing)
• physics or general science (because of the nature of musical acoustics)
• history (because of changes in musical styles over time)
• English (because of relationships of musical lyrics and themes with literary themes)
• world languages (because of comparisons of music and songs among cultures)

Still another way to encourage mastery orientation is to focus on students’ individual effort and improvement as much as possible, ratherthan on comparing students’ successes to each other. You can encourage this orientation by giving students detailed feedback about how they canimprove performance, or by arranging for students to collaborate on specific tasks and projects rather than to compete about them, and in general by showingyour own enthusiasm for the subject at hand.

Self-determination theory

Common sense suggests that human motivations originate from some sort of inner “need.” We all think of ourselves as having various “needs,” a need for food, for example, or a need for companionship—that influences our choices and activities. This same idea also forms part of some theoretical accounts of motivation, though the theories differ in the needs that they emphasize or recognize. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is an example of motivations that function like needs that influence long-term personal development. According to Maslow, individuals must satisfy physical survival needs before they seek to satisfy needs of belonging, they satisfy belonging needs before esteem needs, and so on. In theory, too, people have both deficit needs and growth needs, and the deficit needs must be satisfied before growth needs can influence behavior (Maslow, 1970). In Maslow’s theory, as in others that use the concept, a need is a relatively lasting condition or feeling that requires relief or satisfaction and that tends to influence action over the long term. Some needs may decrease when satisfied (like hunger), but others may not (like curiosity). Either way, needs differ from the self-efficacy beliefs, which are relatively specific and cognitive, and affect particular tasks and behaviors fairly directly.

A more recent theory of motivation based on the idea of needs is self-determination theory, proposed by the psychologists Richard Ryan and Edward Deci (2000), among others. The theory proposes that understanding motivation requires taking into account three basic human needs: