The Blue Blog

Motivation has been a topic in education that has always left me at a loss for words.  I always thought that there was no real way to “motivate” students in a classroom setting, but that as a teacher one must hope that students will want to get something out of the material.  I have therefore found, as someone without much background knowledge on the topic, that Brophy’s expectancy x value model is a good start to understanding basic motivational strategies in the classroom.   Some warning signs came up in my head, however, that have to do with the issues that cannot be solved by looking at this simple model.  The author of the article does mention that some students will not place a high value on work because it does not have much to do with their chosen career path, but nothing is mentioned of those students who seem to have zero motivation or expectancy of success in most or all academic situations.  I can remember several friends in high school who fit this description, and the lack of value they placed on the work had to do with something other than their personal interests- it had to do with the environment that surrounded them.  Going by my own observations, their homes were not places where anyone put a high value on schoolwork or even going to school.  These kinds of outside factors, while maybe not the only ones that lead to placing a low value on a task, nevertheless have a huge influence on what people value.

Another topic that seems to go along with motivation is self-fulfilling prophecies.  As Brophy suggests, students should not make their attributions of success or failure on a permanent view of ability (such as “I failed because I’ve always been dumb”) but should measure their performance based on current ability to do the specific task (such as long multiplication problems).  Sometimes, however, teachers or others in the school community will make attributions of a student’s performance based on a permanent view of their ability.  If a teacher sees a student as being “not too bright overall,” then the student can internalize this view and fulfill the teacher’s prophecy about them.  It goes without saying that students who think that they are not smart will have very low expectancy and, therefore, lower motivation.  We as educators are going to have to do more than just model good attribution practices- we also have to monitor our more unconscious attitudes about students so that we do not convey, for lack of a better phrase, a negative vibe.

Up to this point in my blog writings have all seemed to be running on a common theme, namely, how my personal experiences tie into the material we are covering.  After reading this article that pattern came up once again as I started to evaluate my own motivations and self-efficacy while I am doing schoolwork.  I noticed that I display a lot of the tendencies that are not very beneficial to learners; I focus on evaluation (grades) instead of having a mastery orientation, and when I make mistakes I tend to forget about all of the other things I have done well instead of attributing failure to factors in the specific situation.  Fortunately, am trying to take some of the information in this article to heart that I believe does apply to many learners, especially the ideas of incremental theory.  If I can learn to be patient with my abilities and let them build up over time, I think it will be a lesson that I can pass on to my students in the future.