Motivation

I believe that it all depends on the student, and how they need to be motivated. Some children are very self motivated and want to do well in school because they genuinely want to learn and do well. Others will need more extrinsic motivation. I feel like as educators, one of the main goals would be to have the child gain intrinsic motivation, because that is how people truly learn. Sometimes with more extrinsic motivators, the child will do the work, only to get it done and get the reward, whereas of a child completes the task because he/she wants to do a good job, they will truly learn from it. As children though, we have to be taught how to be more intrinsically motivated. Some of the theories that I thought really helped me as a child was verbal praise, and competition. I always really enjoyed hearing praise from my teacher when I had done well. I also think that competition really helped as well. I feel like physical rewards, such as stickers or candy, worked best when I was younger, however when I was middle school and high school, I really enjoyed of a teacher gave the class a competitive game to play, instead of just a study guide. With these different extrinsic motivators, I think that teachers can help students to gain  intrinsic motivation.