A Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Enhancing academic and Practice

36 ❘
Teaching, supervising, learning
Table 3.3 Motivational generalisations and design principles (continued)
Motivational generalisation
Design principle
Higher levels of value
motivate students.
Goals motivate and
direct students.
• Provide tasks, materials, and activities that are relevant
and useful to students, allowing for some personal
identification with learning.
• Classroom discourse should focus on importance and
utility of content and activities.
• Use organisational and management structures that
encourage personal and social responsibility and
provide safe, comfortable and predictable
environment.
• Use cooperative and collaborative groups to allow for
opportunities to attain both social and academic goals.
• Classroom discourse should focus on mastery,
learning, and understanding course and lecture
content.
• Use task, reward and evaluation structures that
promote mastery, learning, effort, progress and
self-improvement standards and less reliance on
social comparison or norm-referenced standards.
Source: Based on Pintrich (2003, p 672)
perceiving this task to be vocationally irrelevant. Hence providing an engaging
assessment topic may not be enough to support and encourage the use of intrinsic
motivation and high levels of achieving orientation if students have not been sufficiently
supported in their development of essay-writing skills and thus writing confidence.
OVERVIEW
The question of how to explore and support the development of our students’ motivation
is far from simple. This research field can be a daunting one to navigate, with related
research using disparate approaches and terminologies (Murphy and Alexander, 2000;
Pintrich, 2003). This chapter has provided a brief insight into some of the research findings
regarding student motivation.
Essentially, students can be motivated or amotivated, reflecting the extent to which
they want to succeed. In addition, they can be intrinsically motivated and/or extrinsically
motivated. Intrinsically motivated students want to learn for learning’s sake, while
extrinsically motivated students study for external rewards.
One might expect that motivation would correlate with both student behaviour and
with academic achievement but research has produced inconsistent results. In addition,
one might expect students to become more highly motivated and more intrinsically
motivated during their time in higher education; once again, however, results are
inconclusive.