Motivation Theory

Motivation is a force used within the educational system to encourage student learning and understanding. In the educational setting, motivation is either an internal force or external force. There are different theories of motivation in the educational setting, including those that state that student behavior is dictated due to either external or internal factors. This discussion concerns the effects of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations and their effect on student learning and success within an educational setting.

Importance of motivation

Most motivation theorists assume that motivation is involved in the performance of all learned responses; that is, a learned behavior will not occur unless it is energized.  The major question among psychologists, in general, is whether motivation is a primary or secondary influence on behavior.  That is, are changes in behavior better explained by principles of environmental/ecological influences, perception, memory, cognitive development, emotion, explanatory style, or personality or are concepts unique to motivation more pertinent.

For example, it is known that people respond to increasingly complex or novel events (or stimuli) in the environment up to a point and then the rate of responding decreases.  This inverted-U-shaped curve of behavior is well-known and widely acknowledged.

Motivates as Behavior

Sometimes it is useful to think of motivation not as something “inside” a student driving the student’s behavior, but as equivalent to the students outward behaviors. This is the perspective of behaviorism. Int its most thorough-going form, behaviorism focuses almost completely on what can be directly seen or heard about a persons's behavior and has relatively few comments about what may lie behind (or "underneath" or "inside") the behavior.




Motivates as Self-Determination
Common sense suggests that human motivations originate from some sort of inner “need”. We all think of ourselves as having various “needs”, a need for food, for example, or a need for companionship—that influences our choices and activities. This same idea also forms part of some theoretical accounts of motivation, though the theories differ in the needs that they emphasize or recognize.


Happy Learning!
Anamika Gupta
IAAN