Have you ever found it interesting when in school, that if you were given a chance to help out (when in elementary) and leave the class (in middle to high school and now college) that you were more motivated to complete or finish that paper or learn a task.
When I was in 5th grade, every other Friday we would have an afternoon where we could hang out, outside of the class room. Yet, in order to get that chance we had to have completed our homework and turned it in daily, been on good behavior and been to school every day. I found it really interesting when I look back on it now, but the teachers where trying to motivate us to do better and or at least the minimum in order to be able to go somewhere else in the school, or in my case the library. That is where the girls hanged out to talk and slack off; in reality we were supposed to be putting up books for the librarian. It was an Incentive or reward, which motivated a certain behavior. I guess you can call it extrinsic motivation because we as children worked towards these goals in order to slack off later. Plus it did place some type of situational interest within us, which our textbook talks about as being a type of interest which is short term and can be seen as the shiny object that draws you in and creates a certain type of motivation or gain in knowledge. Even though situational interest is great, a teacher tries to create a more logical expectation of personal interest in a student, which is a long term interest and the student does these activates on their own accord. Now, I was a student who did well regardless because I personally found that I wanted to achieve more than was expected for me, as well show my parents that I was a good student. I didn't receive an allowance and I didn't get a pass on my chores, but I knew in the long run that I would benefit someday from my motivation to learn. But for other students these incentives were what drove them to at least meet these requirements.
So I searched for ways to motivate students, now I understand that this list is aimed at a younger crowd, but can you imagine if these still worked for us today?
http://specialed.about.com/cs/behaviordisorders/a/rewards.htm
The list is funny to look back on, but I remember some of these working, here are a few of my favorite.
· Take a bubble blower out at recess.
· Free homework passes.
· Leader for a day.
· Earn points for class Video.
When you were a child in elementary what motivated you? What motivates you now? Were and are there rewards involved? Like an allowance or a pass of doing chores? Do you think that this reward system has or could have backfired potentially? Also, in thinking about this, our class has some fun activities and incentives as well and do you think that will affect your motivation in learning the material?
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