Scenario

It is useful to examine these strategies in an educational context. In a tenth grade geography classroom, Ms. Betty assigned a group project to her students. The goal of this assignment was for students to learn the geographic location and some key information about east Asian countries. After Ms. Betty described the group assignment, students formed five teams of three students each. Each team chose one of the Asian nations and wrote a five-minute news release about it. The students were to act as anchors of a news show to introduce their country to the audience. The goal of the news report was to help students learn general information about the featured country.

In the initial phase of this assignment, Ms. Betty gave the students the opportunity to choose their team partners, create their project timeline, design their content outline, and assign duties to each team member. She told the students to take responsibility for their own products and she would assist as facilitator and coach. However, Ms. Betty still spent time reviewing the groups' plans for potential problems. She also provided some television news clips for students and provided guidelines for writing a good news report.

Ms. Betty also discussed the project with each group before they started. She asked questions to determine their goals, such as:

• What do you expect to learn from this assignment?
• Why did you choose this country?
• Why did you select these perspectives to do the introduction?
• What personal skills do you want to contribute to the project?

Once Ms. Betty understood her students’ goals and expectations of the project, she made sure that their progress matched their original plan as she met with them weekly throughout the process. During their weekly appointments students reported on their progress. Ms Betty provided feedback as needed and helped the students find ways of applying their skills and talents to the project.

Finally, Ms. Betty asked each student to write a short paper to report his/her reflections about the project. She wanted the students to focus on any gaps between their original expectations and the final results as well as to find out what the students learned from the project. She used these notes to revise her instructional strategies for the next semester.

The following section provides some elaboration on each of the six strategies used in this example.

Choice

Malone and Lepper (1983) suggest that providing explicit choices among alternatives can enhance intrinsic motivation. Schiefele (1991) identified two components of interest: feeling-related and value-related valences. Feeling-related valences are feelings attached to a topic. Value-related valences relate to the importance of the topic to an individual. Value-related valences are associated with "constructing meaning" and are discussed later in this chapter. Feeling-related valences are the degree of enjoyment that an individual has toward a topic or object. If students are allowed to select a tasks that they personally enjoy doing, their motivation to learn increases.

When students are given choices to select assignments that are close to their personal interests, their motivation to do the work should increase. Ms. Betty allowed students to select the country that their group project would focus on. She gave them this choice hoping that the students would take responsibility for the assignment because it corresponded with their interests. For instance, Group A chose to introduce Japan because they liked to watch Japanese cartoons. Group B selected Taiwan because they had recently viewed a movie produced in Taiwan and were curious about the background of the movie. These feeling-related valences can be factors that enhance the motivation of learning.

Challenge

Providing or operating tasks just beyond the skill level of the students is a good approach to challenge learners. In the motivation chapter, the Flow Theory is presented (Csikszentmihalyi, 1985). Students may experience flow if the challenge of assignments matches their skills. Work that is too difficult raises anxiety, whereas tasks that are too easy contribute to boredom; both situations decrease motivation toward learning. In order to ensure that goals remain challenging, teachers should continue giving students the opportunity to provide feedback. Helping students search for more information to improve and revise their tasks plays an integral part in the learning process.

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