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by dwater
792 days ago
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When I was in my teaching Masters program, we talked a lot about intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is when you want to do something for yourself, e.g. you enjoy the satisfaction of solving a problem. Extrinsic motivation is when your reason for doing it comes from outside yourself, e.g. your parents tell you they'll give you $20 for every A you get on your report card. The district I worked in experimented with extrinsic motivators to get students to attend school and perform well on the test with rewards like food, gift cards, and electronics. That was enough to get some students to try to do better, but usually only the students who already had some intrinsic motivation. The students that they were really trying to motivate were the ones with no intrinsic motivation, and they largely ignored the rewards offered. |
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The class was a required class for teachers to get their education degree. Back then, they had to have that degree in order to teach in the schools.
I doubt that many of them were thrilled for math, especially the more foundational topics we were going through so yes, their intrinsic motivation was mostly not high.
However their extrinsic motivation should have been off the charts. They literally couldn't get their degree without passing the course. Many were repeating the course having failed it before, so their chances were running out.
I do not recall any of the students being the normal 18 to 21 college students - - they were all older. They better understood why they were choosing their degree (looking back, based on demographics, I suspect many were divorcees prepping for a career or moms whose children had started school).
I gave the memorization question as a way to see how much of it was the work they were putting in and much was my inability to explain the difficult material in a way they could understand.