Motivation is one of the reasons for everything you did or perform. It is also the reasons for your peaceful life. Therefore, it is mandatory in a student’s life if you are one. If you are not motivated, you will not able to fully concentrate on your learning. Before jumping to the discussion on the necessity of motivation and especially the intrinsic motivation, let’s understand the concept and its types.
Motivation:
Motivation stimulates desire and energy to become interested in performing a job. It can happen for both internal and external factors. It helps to make you more concerned about your goal and it does not let you stop until the goal is achieved. You can compare it with the definition of the dream given by A. P. J. Abdul Kalam:
“Dream is not what you see in sleep. They are the things that do not let you sleep.”
Motivation is like the dream that does not let you stop until you reach your destination.
Some of the popular definitions of motivation:
“Motivation is a driving force which stimulates an individual to initiate and sustain a behavior.”
“Motivation is a biological, social, or psychological state that drives a person towards a specific action.”
“Motivation is a desire that fuels an individual to perform or continue an action based on needs and wants of the individual.”
Types of Motivation:
Extrinsic Motivation: It is a purposeful motivation that will fuel your desire to reach a goal to gain any types of external rewards such as money, fame, grades, incentives, awards, appreciation certificates, prizes, scholarship, and praise.
Intrinsic Motivation: Intrinsic Motivation involves you to perform for your personal interest or love towards a passion or hobby.. For example, you enjoy drawing pictures, so you will be intrinsically motivated to make an amazing art.
Extrinsic Vs Intrinsic Motivation
Both types of motivation are essential for students. However, it is sometimes difficult to motivate the students intrinsically as it requires time, energy, supervision, and more. However, providing extrinsic motivation is comparably easy and effective as you can easily manage gifts or praise them for their work.
But providing or raising awareness and motivation intrinsically is a little bit tough. It is a common tendency among many students to skip class lessons or home works. Motivating Passive students is very difficult as they make themselves busy with other works such as games, mobile, sports, gossiping, etc. You need to supervise them very carefully which requires both time and energy.
Here are the three Cs that can motivate a student intrinsically:
Curiosity:
“I think, at a child’s birth if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift should be curiosity.” —Eleanor Roosevelt
Davis, researchers from the University of California, expressed the view that there is a link between curiosity and motivation and curiosity affects learning. For raising the curiosity of your learners, you may collect books related to their interest. For example, for a science lover, you may suggest books about the scientific inventions while for bike or cycle lovers, you may give them books related to the invention and creation of the wheel and other transportation.
You may also present new and interesting information in chunks. You should tailor the lesson based on your learner’s curiosity and interest so that they become more encouraged for learning.
Challenge
As a trainer or teacher, you may engage the students to undertake real challenges. Inspire them to take intellectual risks and face challenges to find out the solution. This will help the students to understand the relation between effort and success and the bonding between motivation and success. Most of the students are excited when they face the challenges. Most of the students will not motivate intrinsically until you engage them even the god gifted-talented students will not motivated unless they are being challenged.
Competition
Competition affects both positively and negatively and sometimes confined with winners and loser. The best way to motivate the students intrinsically is to encourage healthy competition. You may challenge them to beat their own record or promote completion against the score instead of other students.
Shortly, there are various ways you can motivate your students intrinsically such as offering choices, ensuring a secure environment, help them in making their task manageable, guide them to set their goals, etc. However, it is the duty of both the teachers and parents to assist their learner and monitor the learning ways so that they can motivate intrinsically and make themselves autonomous learners.