Motivating Students

Student motivation is more important than intelligence. Motivated students work longer than more intensively. Good teaching uses and fosters motivation; bad teaching kills it.

How Can We Motivate Students?

• Enthusiasm from the lecturer
• Cultivating Existing Motives

 Common Motives of Students:

• "Deep" and "surface" Approaches
• surface approach: students' intentions are to store information; to memorize facts and principles without much thought. They think of the teacher's role as presenting information and the students' role as reproducing it in examinations to demonstrate that they know it. 
• Deep approach: emphasize thought rather than memory. They integrate new ideas to those already possessed. They exercise imagination, distinguish principles from examples and look for the overall structure of ideas.
• The Desire for Relevance
• Curiosity
• Achievement and Fear
• Fear of Failure: Although fear of examinations can help urge the student to study more, fear, is not normally conducive to high student motivation. Study has shown that average students learned more from lectures when they knew they would be tested on it; but knowing this did not affect the performance of good and poor students. 
• Desire for Personal Achievement
• Need for Social Interaction : working in groups helps motivation. 
• Activity and Esteem: motivate students by letting them first taste the fruit of success and giving positive feedback and praise.