What is motivation?

01. What is motivation? You are setting quietly, reading a book , when suddenly you hear a loud noise. You jump a little and gasp. Was your action motivated, “No”, you say. “I jumped involuntarily”. Now I tell you that I want to do a little experiment. As soon as you hear me tap my pencil. You should try to jump and gasp just as you did the first time. I tap my pencil, and sure enough, you jump and gasp. Was that action motivated, “yes”, you reply. So, what appears to be approximately the same behavior can be motivated at one time and unmotivated at another time. Can we trust people to tell us whether their behavior was motivated or unmotivated, not always. Someone accused of murder says. “I didn’t mean to kill. It was an accident.” Your friend, who promised to drive you somewhere and then left without you, says, “I didn’t do it purpose. I just for got.” How can we determine whether a behavior is motivated or accidental, we need a clear understanding of how motivated behaviors differ from unmotivated behavior What, if anything, do various types of motivated behavior have in common? That is what distinguishes a motivated act from a reflex? motivated behaviors vary from time to time and person to person. For example, on a hot day, you drink lemonade and get into a swimming pool; On a cold day, you drink hot chocolate and put on a heavy coat. Perhaps the foremost characteristic of motivated behaviors is that they are goal directed. If we motivated to accomplish something, we try one approach after another until we succeed. If necessary, we set up sub goals we need to meet on our way to the final goal. For example, if we were motivated to improve our house, we might start by making a list of the items that need repair and the tools we will need. These criteria are good in principle. However, nearly all behaviors are combinations of motivation and reflex. Even intentional acts such as walking depend on leg reflexes that maintain balance. Eating is motivated but requires reflexes of digestion. Fixating our eyes on a target is motivated but is also controlled by reflexive movements of eye muscles. Like many other important terms in psychology, motivation is difficult to define. Let’s consider several possibilities: “motivation is what activates and directs behavior.” That description fits many examples well enough, but it also fits some non motivational phenomena. For instance, light activates and directs the growth of plants, but we would hardly say that light motivates plants. So, above passages we can understand characteristics of motivated behaviors. Motivated behaviors vary from time to time, from situation to situation, and from person to person. They persist until the individual reaches the goal. 02. Drive theories of motivation To hull, the basis of motivation was a state of bodily need that arose from a deviation from optimal biological conditions. Rather than introducing the concept of biological need directly into his system, however, hull postulated the intervening variable of “Drive”, a term that had already come into us in psychology. Drive was defined as a stimulus arising from a state of tissue need that arouses or activates behavior. In hull’s view, reduction or satisfaction of a drive is the sole basis for reinforcement. The strength of the drive can be empirically determined by the length of deprivation, or by the intensity, strength, and energy expenditure of the resulting behavior. Hull considered length of deprivation to be and imperfect measure and placed greater emphasis on response strength. And also famous psychologist McDougall, {1932} proposed that the study of motivation could usefully be approached by Identifying a range of different behaviors engaged in by an animal, and assuming that each of these behaviors represented a manifestation of some kind of underlying drive, which provided the energy for the behavior to take place. So, according to McDougall the presence of a drive could be inferred from the behavior that an animal was showing. There are many types of drives, they are I. Primary and secondary drives A number of attempts were made to classify type of drive. Morgan{1943} drew a distinction between Primary Drives- those which satisfied a basic need within the organism- and Secondary drives, which were learned or social. Morgan further subdivided the primary drives into two kinds: Physiological drives, which were concerned with unavoidable physiological necessities, such as hunger, sleep, thirst, and sex; and general drives, concerned with more wide-ranging or less specific goals, like exploration, fear, manipulation and affection. II. Drive-reduction Dive-reduction, in hull’s view, was what motivated and energized learning: a rat would learn to press a lever in a Skinner box only because it was hungry, and because the food reward reduce that hunger. Without the food to satisfy the primary drive of hunger, learning would not take place. Hull’s theory was interesting, because it introduced an internal variable to the idea the of stimulus response learning. The strict behavior, such as Watson had insisted that learning to place through direct links between stimulus and response {S-R}. But hull was arguing that the internal state of the organism was a necessary part of that learning that the link was stimulus-organism-response {S-O-R}. Moreover, hull argued, if a stimulus was consistently associated with the satisfaction of a primary drive-for example, if a mother was constantly present whenever her infant was fed-then that stimulus itself would become rewarding, through association. So, according to Hull, even more complex behavior could be traced back to a motivational origin in terms of the satisfaction of a primary drive. It was the internal state of the organism which determined whether it would learn or not. III. Homeostatic and non-homeostatic drives In 1967, Grossman propose that distinction could be drawn between homeostatic and non- homeostatic drives. Some kinds of drives are triggered off internally, by the state of the body. Hunger, thirst and maintaining body temperature are all like that-they are internally initiated, and concerned with maintaining homeostasis. The concept of drive was a very popular one, common throughout the psychology of the 1950s and 1960s. Maslow {1954} even proposed that the higher forms of human motivation could be categorized in terms of drives, or needs, which energized human behavior. According to Maslow’s hierarchy, the more primitive or basic needs would have to be satisfied before the higher-order needs became important. However, the type of approach to drive theory incorporates quite complex social and cognitive aspects of human behavior; and as such it was rather different from motivation as studied by the physiological and psychologists. Since most experimental research was conducted using animals as subjects, psychologists’ attention at that time focused mostly on the basic, primary drives and not on the more complex social motivation. The drive- reduction model of motivation was challenged on a number of fronts. Humanistic psychologists such as Carl Rogers argued that higher-order needs like the need for Self actualization were fundamental to human beings, and not simply the outcome of an elaborate chain of association from feeding in infancy or the sublimation of the sex drive. Physiological psychologists too, discovered that animals would learn to press levers for non-nutritive rewards, like flashing lights or sounds, so it gradually became clear that Hull’s model of motivation as drive- reduction was not the whole story. But as research into the basic manifestations hunger continued, it revealed a number of underlying physiological mechanism, which we will look at before going on to consider some of the more complex forms of social motivation. IV. Hunger All beings who are living in the earth depend on the foods and drinking. Without foods they can’t live. Especially human beings, they always try to do for getting foods. One of the first questions, then, how do we know when to stop eating? Le Magnen {1972} showed that when people eat, they don’t actually keep eating for very long, and they stop eating long before the food can have been digested. Animals to the same: as a general rule, a hungry animal will eat up to certain point, but will then refuse to eat any more, even though it is not possible for it to have digested what it has just eaten. Drive theory assumes that the process of satisfying a need involves four major features. The first is the existence of a need state in the individual. The individual should be hungry, thirty or something similar. This need state then stimulates the drive activity, which directs the organism’s behavior towards the goals stimulus: food, water or whatever else is likely to satisfy the need. When the goal stimulus has been reached, a fast-acting feedback loop then reduce the drive activity. The message which arrive via the feedback loop make sure that the behavior tops at an appropriate time; but the need state itself, which initiated the whole process, is reduced very much more gradually. V. Station In 1942, Hetherington and Ranson showed that laboratory rats with lesion in the ventromedial nucleus of the hypothalamus would overeat dramatically, and become massively obese The researches suggested that this area of the hypothalamus must be the area which regulated hunger. The brain lesions had damaged this area, which meant that hunger was increased, and so the animals would overeat. 03. Achievement motivation of Sri Lankan students Infant and young children appear to be propelled by curiosity, driven by an intense need to explore, interacted with, and make sense of their environment. As one author puts it, “Rarely does one hear parents complain that their per school is “unmotivated”. Unfortunately, So children grow, their passion for learning frequently seems to shrink, learning often becomes associated with drudgery instead of delight. A large number of students- more than one in four- leave school before graduating. Many more are physically present in the class room but largely mentally absent, they fail to invest themselves fully in the experience of learning. Awareness of how students’ attitudes and beliefs about learning develop and what facilitates for its own sake can assist educators in reducing student apathy. i. What is student motivation Student motivation naturally has to do with students’ desire to participate in the learning process. But it also concerns the reasons or goals that underlie their involvement or noninvolvement in academic activities. Although students may be equally motivated to perform a task, the sources of their motivation may differ. A students who is INTRINST motivated undertakes an activity “for its own sake, for the enjoyment it provides, the learning it permits, or the feelings of accomplishment it evokes” An EXTRINSICALLY motivated students performs “IN ORDER TO obtain some reward or avoid some punishment external to the activity itself”. Such grades, stickers or teachers approval. ii. What factors influence the development of students’ motivation According to JERE BROPHY {1987}, motivation to learn is a competence acquired “through general experience but stimulated most directly through modeling, communication of expectations, and direct instruction or socialization, by significant others {especially parents and teachers}. Children’s home environment shapes the initial constellation of attitudes they develop toward learning. When parents nurture their children’s natural curiosity about the world by welcoming their questions, encouraging exploration, and familiarizing them with resources that can enlarge their world, they are giving their children the message that learning is worthwhile and frequently fun and satisfying. When children are raised in a home that nurtures a sense of self-worth ,competence, autonomy, and self- efficacy. They will be more apt to accept the risks inherent in learning. Conversely, when children do not view themselves as basically competent and able, their freedom to engage in academically challenging pursuits and capacity to tolerate and cope with failure are greatly diminished. Once children start school, they begin forming beliefs about their school-related success and failures. The source to which children attribute their success {commonly, effort, ability, luck or task difficulty} and failures {often lack of ability or lake of effort} have important implications for how they approach and with learning situations. School wide goals, policies, and produces also interact with class room climate and practices to affirm an alter students’ increasingly complex learning-related attitudes and beliefs. iii. How can motivation to learn be fostered in the school settings Although the students’ motivational histories accompany them into each new class room setting. If is essential for teachers to view themselves as “ACTIVE SOCIALIZATION AGENTS capable of stimulating student motivation to learn.” Class room climate is important. If students experience the class room as a caring. Supportive place where there is a sense of belonging and everyone is valued. And respected, they will tend to participate more fully in the process of learning. Various task dimensions can also foster motivation to learn. Ideally, tasks should be challenging but achievable relevance also promotes motivation, as does “Contextualizing learning”, that is helping students to see how skills can be applied in the real world. Tasks that involves a moderate amount of discrepancy or incongruity” are beneficial because they stimulate students’ curiosity, an intrinsic motivator. In addition, defining tasks in terms of specific; short- term goals can assist students to associated effort with success verbally nothing the purpose of specific tasks when introducing them to student is also beneficial. Extrinsic reward, on the other hand, should be used with caution, for thy have the potential for decreasing existing intrinsic motivation. What takes place in the class room is critical, but “the class room is not an island “depending on their degree of congruence with class room goals and practices. School wide goals either dilute or enhance class room efforts. To support motivation to learn school- level policies and practices should stress “learning, task mastery, and effort” rather than relative performance and competition. Conclusion When we consider the above mentioned facts, it is clear that how to influence of achievement motivation in Sri Lankan students, by using theories of psychologists. And also we can understand, what is motivation and how to effect the students in Sri Lanka. Contents Page • Abstract 1. What is Motivation? 2. Drive theories of motivation I. Primary and Secondary Drives II. Drive-Reduction III. Homeostatic and non-homeostatic IV. Hunger V. Satiation Achievement motivation of Sri Lankan students What is student motivation? What factors influence the development of students’ motivation? How can motivation learn be fostered in the school settings? Conclusion