The
Importance of Motivation
Wieman (2013, p. 2) 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.
Johansson (2010: 9) mention the
importance of that learning is taking place for the person’s own sake, that
there is an inner motivation. The inner
motivation is important to reach the best effect upon the learning of
different situations. The
researchers say that
those who have
inner motivation often uses
more advanced ways
of studying than
those who have a
motivation that comes from outer rewards such as grades
Lai (2011, p. 8) 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.
