Mr. Chen is beginning his second year of teaching sixth grade in a low-income ar

Question

Mr. Chen is beginning his second year of teaching sixth grade in a low-income area. He has always been driven by goals and is trying to help his students learn to set and achieve goals, but his students didn’t respond well to his performance goal orientation last year. Mr. Chen recently revisited his educational psychology text from college and read the chapter about motivation. Now he wants to change the goal orientation for his teaching and help his students work toward mastery goals. What might he do to establish a pattern of mastery goal orientation?

Explanation / Answer

Motivation can be described as the reason behind a behaviour that leads to certain actions produced. Motivation are of two types; internal motivation and external motivation. Some people are internally motivated, while others need an external reason to perform a particular task. Motivation plays a very important role in education. If only an individual is motivated to excel in his academics, will he perform exceptionally well in his exams. If an individual is not motivated enough to do well in his tests, he will get complacent and is most likely to score low.

A person needs to be motivated internally or may need an external motivation to perform better. Motivation from teachers or instructors in students is a form of external motivation. The three ways in which instructors can help increase motivation in students are:

1. Setting a goal: If the teacher sets a goal for the students to complete a certain amount of units per day, the student may more likely achieve the goal when it is set by the teacher instead of when told, they can finish how many ever chapters they want to in a day. When a goal is set, it is more likely to be achieved than when no goals are set.

2. Incentives or rewards: When students are baited with a reward that follows, after a certain goal is achieved, it elicits a desirable behaviour. When students are told that they get extra time for play if they finish the work that has been assigned to them, the student is ought to finish his work as he does not want to stay back in the class while others are out playing soccer.

3. Including fun activities: Learning can be very mundane, but it can be made fun by including fun activities in the classroom like a role play or visual teaching aids. A student is more likely to be motivated to learn and perform if he finds the material being taught interesting.

Three ways that students can help themselves be more motivated are as follows:

1. Set goals for oneself: Instead of the teacher or instructor setting goals for them, they should be motivated from within to fair well in an examination. They should set a goal for reading a certain number of pages in a day before they close their books. If they set a goal for themselves, they are more likely to achieve it and most importantly be satisfied. Satisfaction of achieving their goal will make them often indulge in behaviour which leads to personal satisfaction.

2. Rewarding oneself: A student could help himself be more motivated if he chooses to reward himself after attaining a goal, like finishing his homework for the day instead of procrastinating for later in the week. He could treat himself with chocolates after completion of his work or take extra play time.

3. Self-efficacy: it can be defined as one's ability to achieve a goal. The confidence within oneself to accomplish a certain goal. Only when you believe in yourself that you can do it, is when you can actually do it. A student should often try attaining goals that they have set for himself, as achieving goals is positivitely associated with developing high self-efficacy which will keep them motivated to study well for their tests.

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