Motivating Your Students

A Value on Learning

The third element that contributes to the motivation of students is whether or not students see a value in what they're learning. The predominant question in the back of every learner's mind is, What's in it for me? Learning something is one thing, but knowing why you need to learn something is quite another.

For motivation to occur, students must know the reasons, rationale, and whys of any learning task. Your students will be more engaged and more motivated when you provide them with specific reasons for learning something. To do that, relate the learning directly to their lives. When students see a connection between what they learn in the classroom and their lives outside the classroom, they'll be motivated to actively participate in the learning process.

Try the following suggestions:

• “Let's take a look at how this idea of friction might affect our performance on a skateboard.”

• “We know Andrew likes to collect baseball cards. If he wanted to add 25 new cards to his collection and each one was priced at $1.79 each, how much money would he need?”

• “Remember the fight on the playground last week? How was that confrontation similar to or different from the conflict between the North and the South?”

• “I know you're all familiar with this rap song. I wonder if we can take the `food pyramid' and turn it into our own rap song.”

It's also important that you provide your students with opportunities to make their own choices. Making personal choices helps develop a sense of ownership and can be a powerful motivational strategy. Students can select various ways to complete an assignment, the due date of an assignment, or the complexity of a learning task. These kinds of decisions offer students a measure of control over their academic lives. More control = more motivation.

Motivated students are active students. As we discussed in Lesson Methodologies, active students are engaged students. Too often students see school as a passive environment—one in which there is little involvement. By utilizing a variety of instructional methodologies, we can provide conditions that will involve and motivate students to take an active role in their own learning.

Provide opportunities for students to create tangible or finished products. Completing a worksheet of addition facts is not a tangible product; answering all the odd-numbered questions after Chapter 11 in the history textbook is not a tangible product. For learning to be meaningful, students must create meaningful products. Here are just a few examples.

For more ways to movtivate your students, see Locus of Control.