0.1 Goals, interests and attributions  (Page 3/7)

How can teachers do so? One way is to allow students to choose specific tasks or assignments for themselves, where possible, because their choices are morelikely than usual to reflect prior personal interests , and hence be motivated more intrinsically than usual. The limitation of this strategy, of course, is that students may not see some of the connectionsbetween their prior interests and the curriculum topics at hand. In that case it also helps for the teacher to look for and point out the relevance ofcurrent topics or skills to students’ personal interests and goals.

Suppose, for example, that a student enjoys the latest styles of music. This interest may actually have connections with a wide range of school curriculum,such as:

• biology (because of the physiology of the ear and of hearing)
• physics or general science (because of the nature of musical acoustics)
• history (because of changes in musical styles over time)
• English (because of relationships of musical lyrics and themes with literary themes)
• world languages (because of comparisons of music and songs among cultures)

Still another way to encourage mastery orientation is to focus on students’ individual effort and improvement as much as possible, ratherthan on comparing students’ successes to each other. You can encourage this orientation by giving students detailed feedback about how they canimprove performance, or by arranging for students to collaborate on specific tasks and projects rather than to compete about them, and in general by showingyour own enthusiasm for the subject at hand.

Motives as interests

In addition to holding different kinds of goals—with consequent differences in academic motivation—students show obvious differences inlevels of interest in the topics and tasks of the classroom. Suppose that two high school classmates, Frank and Jason, both are taking chemistry, andspecifically learning how to balance chemical equations. Frank finds the material boring and has to force himself to study it; as a result he spendsonly the time needed to learn the basic material and to complete the assignments at a basic level. Jason, on the other hand, enjoys the challengesof balancing chemical equations. He thinks of the task as an intriguing puzzle; he not only solves each of them, but also compares the problems to each otheras he goes through them.

Frank’s learning is based on effort compared to Jason’s, whose learning is based more fully on interest. As the example implies, when students learn from interest they tend to devote more attention to the topic than if they learn from effort (Hidi&Renninger, 2006). The finding is not surprising since interest is another aspect of intrinsic motivation —energy or drive that comes from within . A distinction between effort and interest is often artificial, however, because the two motives often get blended or combined in students’ personalexperiences. Most of us can remember times when we worked at a skill that we enjoyed and found interesting, but that also required effort to learn. Thechallenge for teachers is therefore to draw on and encourage students’ interest as much as possible, and thus keep the required effort withinreasonable bounds—neither too hard nor too easy.