Motivation

From the lecture and book I learned more about motivation. Motivation is important for helping student become successful in life. I think it is better to have student be intrinsically motivated because they want to learn and do well for themselves. On the other hand, student that are extrinsically motivated do school work for the grade or for the teacher approval. Giving students little rewards, such as pencils, erasers and little toys, can make a student work hard solely so they can get the reward. In these situations the student doesn’t learn the information as well and the information will not stick with them.

I enjoyed learning about self efficacy in this section. Self efficacy is how a person thinks they will perform on a specific task. It is based largely on past successes, self regulation, and mastery goals. Just recently I did a research paper on math anxiety and I found that self efficacy largely tied into it. When a student does poorly on math tests and homework assignments they begin to fear math and be very anxious through out the subject. The student self efficacy tells them they are not good a math and will do poorly again.