What motivates students?
Principles 9–12 relate to providing students with opportunities to learn using motivation.
Motivation
Teaching principles for creative, talented, and gifted students
Principle 9
Students tend to enjoy learning and to do better when they are more intrinsically (rather than extrinsically) motivated to achieve
Research shows that both intrinsic (internally rewarding) and extrinsic motivation (to earn a reward or avoid punishment) play a role in enhancing student learning and mastery across all domains. Gifted students are often more intrinsically motivated than other students, at least when it comes to academic and intellectual activities.
Tips for teachers
The most common barrier to gifted students developing intrinsic motivation is that they are often not working on material that is optimally challenging for them. Another barrier to the development of intrinsic motivation is that gifted students are often praised by parents and educators for completing work quickly and easily, as well as for receiving the highest grade or winning a competition. Praise for effort, for learning new, challenging material and for mastering new skills is likely to lead to mastery goals, are more aligned with developing intrinsic motivation.
- Identify areas in which a student has particularly shown improvement or growth, and encourage them to consider next levels of challenge.
- When using any external constraints like deadlines, teachers should consider if the constraints will be perceived as too controlling. Allowing students to choose from achievement activities and to have a role in establishing rules helps to foster perceptions of autonomy.
- Small groups, particularly those made up of students with similar interests and abilities, can be an excellent structure for promoting creative problem solving.
Principle 10
Students persist in the face of challenging tasks and process information more deeply when they adopt mastery goals rather than performance goals
Mastery goals are oriented toward acquiring new skills or improving levels of competence. In contrast, students, including gifted ones, who adopt performance goals are motivated to complete tasks to show they have adequate ability or to avoid difficult tasks to conceal fears of being “unmasked” as not gifted. There is a close relationship between mastery/performance goals and “mindset.”
Tips for teachers
Teachers can foster mastery goals by:
- Avoiding social comparisons and emphasizing individual effort, current progress over past performance and improvement when evaluating student work.
- Providing praise that provides no information on how to improve (such as, “brilliant”) reflects a performance orientation and should be avoided.
- Encouraging students to see mistakes or wrong answers as learning opportunities rather than evidence of inadequate ability.
- Individualizing pacing instruction by including students in setting timelines for completing tasks.
- When using cooperative learning, vary the composition of student groups. Although mixed-ability groups are often recommended in research (typically a high achiever, a low achiever and two average achievers), a student who is always the highest performer in a group may not get the opportunity to stretch intellectually and to master new skills.
Principle 11
Teachers' expectations about their students affect students' opportunities to learn, motivation and learning outcomes
Differential treatment may increase the gap between high- and low-performing gifted students over time. Depending on personality traits, some students will take teacher expectations as a challenge, while others may show a decrease in academic performance. Teachers should be well acquainted with the typical behavior, preferences and interests of gifted students, respond to them appropriately, and avoid basing their expectations solely on past achievements of other gifted students.
Tips for teachers
Teachers should:
- Continually assess the reliability of the information they are using to form their expectations.
- Discuss and explain the reasoning for their expectations with students and their parents.
- Encourage gifted students to gradually generate and self-regulate their expectations regarding their learning and academic achievements.
- Consider the social context when creating and communicating high expectations. It is likely that gifted students will not want to fulfill expectations that will alienate them from their classmates and make them feel “too different.”
- Be able to respond appropriately by providing constructive feedback when gifted students perform poorly and/or fail to satisfy teachers’ high expectations.
- Guide gifted students in how to meet expectations for appropriately challenging activities.
Principle 12
Setting goals that are short term (proximal), specific, and moderately challenging enhances motivation more than establishing goals that are long term (distal), general and overly challenging.
Some gifted students may set serious long-term goals, particularly within a domain of talent (e.g., “I want to be a professional musician at an earlier age than typical peers). Additionally, among gifted students, high levels of intrinsic motivation and/or academic talent may allow for setting difficult goals and achieving them. These need to be supported by parents and teachers, as some areas of giftedness will require long-term planning and support.
Tips for teachers
Students need to be provided with opportunities to set short-term, specific and moderately difficult goals in their classroom work.
- It is important to document student progress and to have regular student-teacher check-ins.
- As students become proficient at setting moderately challenging short term goals, they will learn to become intermediate risk takers (not aspiring too low or too high). This is an important characteristic of achievement-oriented individuals.
- If gifted students can grasp longer term goals than their peers, teachers can meet their needs through differentiating goal-setting concepts and encouraging higher level executive functioning techniques.
- Teachers should provide regular feedback to students during the goal-setting process so they can modify their efforts and their goals.
Last updated: December 2024Date created: 2018
