This document discusses motivation and learning. Part one covers psychological understandings of motivation including effectance motivation, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and how motivation relates to educational contexts. Part two identifies motivations to learn through a case study, discusses interventions for increasing teacher expectations and divergent thinking, and how to create motivating seminars. The document emphasizes that motivation is specific to activities, learning is more motivated when contextualized, and both teacher expectations and developing identities as learners can impact motivation.

1. & Learning
Jenna Condie
University of Salford
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2. Session Overview
Part One:
• Motivation as crucial to learning in formal contexts
• Psychological understandings of motivation
• Empowerment, Edutainment and Creativity
Part Two:
• Identifying motivations to learn in a real case study
• Interventions for increasing teacher expectations
• Divergent thinking and creativity
• Creating motivating seminars
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3. Motivation defined – what is it?
Image created on Visual Thesaurus
“…the psychological
processes that lead us to
do certain things”
(Long, 2007, p. 104)
Is motivation a general
quality?
Is motivation relatively
specific to activity?
Is it better considered as
a process?
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4. Effectance motivation (White, 1959)
Babies are born with a desire to master their
environment
Behaviour
Control/
Feedback
Agency
Expected
Goals
Outcomes
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Flickr: Wayan Vota

5. Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation
Intrinsic motivation – that from within the
individual
Extrinsic motivation
- that from outside
an individual.
Flickr: Official U.S. Navy Imagery
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6. Educational context…
• Teachers face difficulties in attempts to
monitor motivation Motive: A reason for doing
in classroom directly. something, esp. one that is
hidden or not obvious
• Educational definitions of motivation focus on
academic achievement and involvement with
tasks at school (Long, 2007)
• Motivation in school as crucial to meaningful
learning
“You don't have to be great to start,
but you have to start to be great” Zig Ziglar
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7. The classroom as decontextualised:
Imagining learning about urban regeneration…
Which method requires more motivation?
Flickr: EG Focus
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8. When motivation isn’t an issue…
Before school Cultures without formal education
Flickr: International Rivers
Learning happens because it
is contextualised, knowledge
Flickr: courosa that is useful and meaningful
(Bruner 1966) 8

9. The Self “Regardless of the theoretical
orientation, the self is considered
nowadays as
multiple, varied, changeable, sometimes as
Flickr: tonyhall
chameleon that changes along with the
context” (Salgado & Hermans, 2009, p. 3)
• Sense of agency - control & choice
• Mastery Orientation – belief that your
achievements are based on your own efforts
(Bukatko & Daehler, 2012)
• Mastery Orientation vs learned helplessness
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10. If ‘who we are’ is not fixed, then can
people develop identities of learning?
Rahm and Ash (2008)
• Out-of-school learning environments enabled
‘disenfranchised youth’ to take on an identity
as insiders to the world of science
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11. Aspirations
In relation to lower income families:
"Differences in the education aspirations of
parents are probably the most important factor
explaining the gap in school completion rates,"
Polidano (2012), University of Melbourne, High School
Completion Study ScienceDaily Article here
Shared on #edupsych this week 11

12. Flickr: henry…
Against the odds: How Working Class
Children Succeed (Siraj‐Blatchford, 2010)
Home
Learning
Environment
(HLE)
- most
significant
factor in
predicting
children’s
learning
outcomes.
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13. Self-Expectations
• Human motivation as dependent upon outcome
expectations (Bandura, 1977)
• Self-efficacy - personal judgments of one’s
capabilities to attain designated goals (Bandura,
1986)
• Self-efficacy beliefs in self-regulated Learning
(SESRL) (Zuffianò et al., 2012)
• Complex relationship between self-esteem &
academic achievement (see Baumeister et al., 2003)
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Flickr: breahn

14. Teacher Expectations
• A classic area of study A.K.A the self-fulfilling
prophecy
• Pygmalion experiment (Rosenthal &
Jacobson, 1968) – relationship between teacher
expectations and student performance
• Brophy (1985) whole class teacher expectation
likely to have greater effect than teachers
expectation for individual students
• Rubie-Davies (2006) Study of HiEx and LoEx
teachers - class level expectation important for
student learning
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Flickr: Gates Foundation

15. Alternatively, are some not buying into
the education success story
i.e. good education = good job?
Flickr: -eko-
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16. Empowerment: A Humanistic Perspective
• Move away from the economic story of education.
• The role of education is to empower – to be able to
think and to do.
• “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to
entertain a thought without accepting it” (Aristotle)
• In control of learning (student-driven).
• Tasks that are intrinsically motivating.
• Encourages learning beyond the formal context.
• However, the realities of teaching and curriculum
coverage constrain this teaching style (Long, 2007)
(Lefranois, 1994)
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Flickr: Capture Queen ™

17. Edutainment
“Edutainment” - a hybrid genre that relies heavily on
visual material, on narrative or game-like formats,
and on more informal, less didactic styles of address.
(Buckingham & Scanlon, 2000, cited in Okan, 2003)
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Flickr: Gustty

18. Play for Learning
• Formal schooling tends A voluntary activity that is
to restricts play to intrinsically motivating
early years. (Amory et al., 1999)
• Play for mastery of skills
• Play theories (Piaget, 1951; Smilansky 1968)
• Serious educational games research:
– Amory et al., (1999) concluded adventure games
provide educators with superior mechanisms to entice
learners into environments where knowledge is
acquired through intrinsic motivation
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19. “Creativity is usually
defined as a combination
of novelty and
appropriateness and has
been associated with
problem-solving and
novelty generation as
well as with reactive and
adaptive behaviour that
allows people to cope up
with turbulent
environments”
(Berglund & Wennberg,
2006, p. 368) 19

20. Creativity and Learning
• Links back to enterprise and workplace – creativity
has wide appeal (see Plucker et al., 2004)
• But don’t say the ‘C Word’!
• Divergent thinking
– Really important or
just a little important?
• More knowledge now
about creativity
• Lacking strategies to
enhance creativity Flickr: Cea.
• How to think (current/future), not what to think
(traditional model)
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21. Potential of creativity rarely fulfilled
Why? “Creativity is important to society, but it traditionally has
been one of psychology’s orphans” (Sternberg & Lubart, 1999, p. 4).
Six Barriers
1 Mystic and spiritual origins;
2 Negative effects of pop psych & commercial Can you
approaches; think of
3 Early work conducted in relative isolation from any other
mainstream psychology
barriers?
4 Elusive or trivial definitions
5 Negative effects of viewing creativity as an
extraordinary phenomenon
6 Narrow, unidisciplinary approaches
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22. How to move forward?
Reconceptualise creativity (Plucker et al., 2004)
“Creativity is the interaction among aptitude,
process, and environment by which an individual or
group produces a perceptible product that is both
novel and useful as defined within a social context.”
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Flickr: mtsofan

23. Group Work
Learning Outcomes
• Apply your knowledge of motivation to a real
case study.
• Recognise individual differences in motivation
• Develop a teacher expectation intervention.
• Examine creativity and look for evidence of
divergent thinking.
• Consider motivations to learn in relation to your
assignment seminars.
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24. & Learning
Jenna Condie
University of Salford
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