Increasing Students’ Motivation to Learn
Description of Case Study Project
The current project is designed to enhance students’ experience in college by making them more motivated to achieve academic goals. A student may fail to achieve academic goals for various reasons. One of the most important reasons is lack of motivation. Insufficient motivation is strongly associated with inadequate academic performance. Indeed, motivation affects acquisition, transfer and use of knowledge and skills by students (Dweck, 1986). Lab and classroom experiments confirm that ability of unmotivated children to acquire and demonstrate knowledge and cognitive skills (Dweck, 1986).
It is disturbing that even a talented student may lack motivation to learn. Lack of motivation then translates into academic underachievement. In such a case an absurd situation emerges: a gifted student fails to achieve academic goals. The task of any educational institutions is to enable its students to strive. In simple terms, a school must embrace the best in students. Therefore, a school must tackle the problem of lack of motivation rather than to adopt a laissez-faire approach. The present project reflects a proactive approach to increasing students’ motivation to learn.
Challenge/Opportunity
The problem of academic underachievement is widespread in the United States. One constantly reads in media that scores in various tests tend to fall. Anderson (2015) reveals that the SAT scores have fallen to the lowest levels since 2005. The decline is observed in all three sections of the test: math, writing and critical reading (Anderson, 2015). There is another worrying trend: college enrollment declines (Long, 2016). These trends may indicate that the value of knowledge and education is diminishing. If that continues to occur on a large scale, there will be serious national repercussions. Indeed, current economy is often described as the knowledge-based economy. In other words, economic output is driven by knowledge. Therefore, a nation which does not properly value knowledge is doomed to fail.
Motivation to learn is not a simple concept. From the perspective of social cognitive model, motivation is multifaceted and dynamic phenomenon (Linnenbrink & Pintrich, 2002). While the complexity of motivational forces is a challenge for launching the project designed to improve motivation, it is also an opportunity. Thus, the complexity means that students can be motivated in multiple ways. The core questions are why and how students are motivated.
Motivation is closely associated with passion. Duallistic model of passion suggests that autonomous motivation generates harmonious passion, the passion which makes individuals to engage in an activity out of their own free will (Stoeber et al, 2011). The one who is driven by harmonious passion does not experience a significant conflict between different life domains. Autonomous motivation which creates this kind of passion suggests the absence of behavioral contingences or rewards (Stoeber et al, 2011). In other words, autonomous motivation means that there are no external impositions on person’s free will.
There is another kind of passion, the obsessive passion. The obsessive passion suggests that an individual is engaged in an activity because of intra- and inter-personal pressure (Stoeber et …
