Essay Example on Student Learning: Motivating for Success

One of the greatest challenges of that every teacher faces in how to make the learning process in the classroom welcoming, exciting and inviting to all learners. Motivation positively enhances learning in students at all levels of instruction from elementary to university. When determining how to improve student learning through motivation, a teacher needs to consider the expected level of performance, the working academic goals, as well as the social and economic factors that affect the learners. Thus, it is important to include motivation strategies when designing a course, regardless of whether it is science or reading comprehension. There are two main types of motivation that teachers can consider to improve classroom performance in middle schools, i.e. intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is the kind of motivation that comes from within the student. It occurs when the student has a high interest in the subject or naturally performs excellently in it. On the other hand, extrinsic motivation is the kind of motivation that comes from external factors related to classroom learning. An individual student's motivational style directly determines the learning approach that they develop and prefer. Therefore, teachers can enhance positive learning effects in all students by employing teaching methods and materials that inspire both extrinsically and intrinsically motivated students.

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Intrinsically motivated students are more likely to do well in a subject because intrinsic motivation draws learners to the task at hand. Thus, intrinsic motivation comes from natural talent, and it does not depend much on the student's self-perception and level of self-confidence. A teacher can promote intrinsic motivation in the classroom by giving the students new material that challenges them to discover further, learn new things, and gain fresh insights. At the same time, the teacher should make the course appealing by including topics that the students find interesting. However, to make intrinsically motivated students continue to nurture their self-motivation to excel in a subject or field, it is necessary to also challenge them with content that is not immediately appealing.

Extrinsically motivated students do not have a natural interest or compulsion to pursue in a subject or field but may have other factors that give them the necessary will and energy to work hard and succeed in it. For instance, when a student is motivated to study to study biology because his/her parents have emphasized the need to pursue medicine at college is extrinsically-motivated to do the subject. The primary drive of these students is to meet specific goals such as impressing parents or experiencing the prestige of being in a given career, joining a profession that pays highly. Unlike the intrinsically motivated students, externally motivated students' performance levels are affected by their self-perception. A teacher can appeal to extrinsically-motivated learners by making the subject or course inspire further exploration. Thus, the teacher should minimize the focus on results to help the students acquire intrinsic motivation.

Scientists have attempted to explain the art of motivation through the operant conditioning theory. In this theory, B. F. Skinner (1938, 1957) used reinforcement to stimulate a response in rats. When this model is applied to the understanding of motivation and student classroom performance, the direct reward that a student gets from excellent performance is the reinforcement (motivator). For example, if a student works hard in a subject to impress the parents with good grades, the student is conditioned to be the operant. Parent's approval is the reinforcement. Motivation, in this case, is the likelihood that the student will work hard in the subject to get parent's approval which is the motivator.

Furthermore, several studies conducted in the recent past have found that motivation does impact student performance in the classroom. Orhan-Ozen (2017) did a meta-analysis study of 205 research studies to examine the relationship between motivation and student achievement. A compilation of the 205 selected studies gave a sample of 772,903 students. The researcher used the random effect model to determine the magnitude and direction of correlation between the variables and found that motivation has a positive but low-level [r =.27] impact on student performance in the classroom. Evidently, the research first, suggested that motivation can have positive effects on student learning. Secondly, it considered a few moderating variables and indicated that the positive effect is generally low for all years, subjects, and countries. However, the level of the effect differed significantly between individual years, subjects and countries. This implies that the level of both intrinsic and extrinsic student motivation depends on the student generation, the subject of study and the sociocultural factors around the student.

Similarly, Sharma and Sharma (2018) conducted another study to determine how self-concept, motivation, academic performance are related among students in their late childhood. Also, the study investigated how the differences in the self-concept of a school student in their late childhood affected their motivation as well as academic achievement. It comes out that significant correlations exist between self-concept, motivation, and academic achievement in this cohort. Besides, the study revealed that the level of motivation is significantly higher in female students than male students. The study, therefore concluded that the outcomes stated above demonstrate the crucial role of self-concept in student motivation and academic achievement.

Although it included self-concept as a compounding variable, the outcome of this study also reinforces the position that motivation can have positive effects on student learning in middle school classrooms. The advantage of this study is that its sample was comprised of students in their late childhood; which chronologically, is the age bracket for middle school students. Therefore, it had high sample validity for the current study. Moreover, the study did not test self-concepts against different types of motivation, thus giving a general impression that self-concept is a moderating factor in the relationship between both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and academic achievement.

Conclusion

Furthermore, Gbollie and Keamu (2017) also agreed that improving student learning outcome requires a good choice of learning strategy and motivation style. The two authors conducted a study to investigate the relationship between learning strategy, motivational beliefs, and academic performance. Also, the study explored various factors that students believe hinder their performance regardless of whether they are motivated or not. Three hundred twenty-three students filled the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire in which they identified 12 factors that can hinder learning in motivated student classrooms. For example, the research suggested the motivational attitude towards extrinsic goal orientation is a greater performance hinderance than test anxiety. Hence, they explain why extrinsic motivational approaches like the use of rewards do not always result in higher student achievement. As such, it emphasizes the importance of learning strategies that enhance the development of intrinsic motivation. As already suggested, an example of such methods is challenging for students to explore new knowledge, discover, and struggle to improve.