The
Importance of Motivation
Ames
(1990) Student motivation has,
for some time,
been described as one
of the fore most
problems in education.
1 It is certainly
one of the
problems most commonly
cited by teachers.
Motivation is important
because it contributes
to achievement, but it
is also important
itself as an
outcome.
Bernaus,
Wilson & gardner (2009) motivation is the most important variable because
if teachers are not motivated the whole notion of strategy use is lost. This study
is unique therefore because it is one of the first that directs attention to
these types of variables as they apply to the class as a whole, and, because it
investigates the relationships among all of these measures.
Wieman
(2013) Student motivation is probably the single most important element of
learning. Learning is inherently hard work; it is pushing the brain to its
limits, and thus can only happen with motivation. Highly motivated students
will learn readily, and make any class fun to teach, while unmotivated students
will learn very little and generally make teaching painful and frustrating.
Fortunately, research shows that there is a lot an instructor can do to
motivate their students to learn.
Lai
(2011) Educators interested in assessing motivation in the context of classroom
learning will need to identify or design tasks with characteristics designed to
optimize the observing students’ motivation. An important point to note is that
because the expression of motivation is so strongly related to the classroom
assessment environment (through self-efficacy, goals, attributions, and the
effect of evaluation on students’ willingness to approach challenging tasks),
suggestions for measuring or assessing student motivation tend to mirror the
suggestions for fostering motivation in the classroom. In other words, many of
the recommendations for assessing motivation described below are intended to
help remove the perceived threat of evaluation and to maximize the actually
observing students’ real motivation levels.
