Motivation Factor

Children taking part in regular classroom discussions are quite similar to adults participating in business meetings. In both situations, if you have difficulty uncovering the relevance of the material as it applies to your situation, you will not care about it. If an adult cannot make the connections in a business meeting and does not care to impress coworkers and superiors, they are likely to tune it all out. If a student does not make the connection between knowing geometry and how it applies to their future, and they are not concerned with teacher praise, they will react in the same way as the adult.

Because we would rather our children are motivated by internal factors (the want to learn) rather than external factors (pleasing the teacher), we need to understand how to make the curriculum match the child. This can be quite easy. If a child wants to help build a bird house for the school's garden, they will happily sit through lessons on geometry if they understand how the lesson applies to the activity. If a given lesson covers a specific area of interest for a student, that student is likely to pay more attention and be motivated to learn.

The majority of children will develop their own preferences towards content areas as they proceed through school. This presents a great problem - what holds interest for one student, may turn off the next. Inherently, students have different backgrounds and enjoy different subjects and this definitely causes some discrepancies. Many children struggle to find the meaning in the content areas and may come to the conclusion that what they are learning is immaterial; therefore losing the intrinsic motivation.

How, then, do we teach a child who holds no intrinsic motivation for learning the subject? How do teachers force students to learn the material? All teachers know the answer to this question - tests. Giving a test only guarantees that the student will know the material the moment their pencil touches the paper (and even that is 50/50). There is no guarantee that the student will retain the information after they turn in their test. The key is giving the students a reason to learn other than the fact that the information is on standardized tests. We, as teachers, must find a way to connect our content areas to everyday situations, showing the students that what they are learning is not futile - it's essential.

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