You’ve probably heard about the battle between intrinsic and intrinsic motivation. Well, here’s a new competitor to think about: the concept of the Motivation to Learn. What does this idea have to add to the debate about the best way to get kids to read? What does it have to do with the Bourne Supremacy? Find out this week on The Psych Files.
Resources for this Podcast
- Link to the book: Looking in Classrooms by Good and Brophy on the Allyn and Bacon site. And the same book on Amazon: Looking in Classrooms (9th Edition)
- Link to the book The Explosive Child: A New Approach for Understanding and Parenting Easily Frustrated, Chronically Inflexible Children
- The Think Kids site
- The Center for Collaborative Problem Solving site.
- The book by Ellen Langer that contains the example regarding birth control is not Mindfulness (although that is one of her books), but rather this book by her: The Power of Mindful Learning
Notes
Motivation to Learn: Why read? Because learning is worthwhile, important
People are naturally drawn to:
- Puzzles – what would happen if you…went outside your spacecraft without a suit (“Moonraker†vs. “2001″)? Dropped a feather and a brick from the same height? If you were swinging a weight on the end of a string and the string broke. Everyday example: the “Bourne Supremacyâ€. The concept of the movie pulls you in: you wake up, don’t know where you are or who you are, yet you seem to have the ability to kill people, and people seem to be out to kill you – why?
- Interesting questions – Why did the dinosaurs die out?
- Problems – the scene from “Apollo 13â€: “We gotta make one of these… out of thisâ€
- Open-ended questions: instead of asking “Can you…â€, ask “How could you..â€. Langer author of “Mindfulness”: Can you make a birth control pill that could be inhaled through the nose? Vs. How could you make a birth control pill that could be inhaled through the nose?
- Contradictions: “Opposites attract” vs. “Birds of a feather flock together”
- Controversy – Did we really land on the moon? Examine the angles of the shadows, etc.
- Suspense – Check out futurelabs http://www.futurelab.org.uk/ – astronauts running out of air http://www.futurelab.org.uk/projects/space_mission_ice_moon/
- Guessing (with no fear of public embarrassment)
Corny joke of the week: Q: Why will you never starve in the desert? A: Because of all the sand which is there!
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On visualizing unusual things: being asked to see chemical compounds as floating and reacting coloured blobs in the air. The speaker believed that this visualization would help out artists– tailoring visualizations to suit specific interests is definitely a cool thing, but that particular i.e. didn’t work with me. Too abstract!
Extrinsic awards would definitely help students keep on track throughout the term. Attendance and reading completion rewards for i.e. discourage skipping and cramming. Rewarding even superficial learning helps with confidence, because it at least keeps course material familiar. Confidence is a good thing to have when an intrinsic task comes up!