The theory of motivation that is the most instructive and helpful for me is the motivational theory of competence and self-worth. I, personally have a need for competence and a need to believe that I can effectively deal with the environment around me. I find myself trying to "gain mastery" over various aspects of my world/life such as school, family, work and friendships. I also have a need to protect my belief that I am a good and extremely capable individual (student especially). In other words, I need to know my self-worth constantly. Also, by achieving success in new and challenging tasks, I feel enormous self-worth.
Competence and self-worth could affect my students negatively by causing self-handicapping. Self-handicapping only occurs when students undermine their odds of success. However, by helping students gain success on challenging tasks, giving students mechanisms through which they can track their own academic progress over time and decreasing the competitions and situations where students judge themselves poorly compared with their peers, I can increase students self-worth as well as their self-efficacy.
Competency, self-worth and self-efficacy can easily be used in my future (special education) classroom. By giving students a rubric or some type of mechanism through which they can track their individual academic progress, they can be aware of their scores and build their self-worth by achieving great scores in different academic subjects.
These motivation theories can also be used in my future special education classroom by decreasing competition among my students. By not revealing students individual grades, students will feel more confident in the classroom and will gain more self-worth knowing that only they will be aware of their individual scores in each academic subject.
Privacy is definitely important. I don't think group contingencies are usually beneficial/good motivators. However they can be helpful if there are individual reviews provided within the group because students do need to work with their peers in groups etc. But providing privacy makes it easier to self-motivate rather than being in competition with others.
ReplyDeleteI believe that self worth, self efficacy and locus of control are all very closely tied to a student's success. Your proposal of creating a rubric through which student's can track their work and (hopefully) their growth and improvements is I think essential, as it works towards promoting all three of the concepts I mentioned above.
ReplyDeleteGabrielle,
ReplyDeleteYour whole first paragraph totally describes how a student with a disability feels I am sure! How great that you can relate in that way with them? I really like your idea about having the students track their own progress because this automatically lets them set personal goals. To add to that, I think it would be a cool idea to have the student actually set the goal he wants to achieve (obviously a goal that is approved by the teacher), and let him choose reinforcers for himself as well. This would definitely lead to good self-efficacy.