Not going to lie, I have had a tough time finding research that I felt was relevant and adequate, but I am excited about the three new research articles I found this week. The first is called Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation Orientations in the Classroom: Age Differences and Academic Correlates. In this paper researchers found that intrinsic motivation is highest in third graders and then decreases steadily to eighth graders. They also found that intrinsic motivation correlates with academic success. This is great for my research because it shows that students my age are more likely to benefit from activities which are intrinsically motivating, such as providing them with more meaningful opportunities to make choices. The second article I found this week is called Enhancing Students' Engagement by Increasing Teachers' Autonomy Support. The researchers in this article found that when teachers moved from being controlling to supporting student autonomy, student engagement greatly increased. This means that allowing students to feel more autonomous and that they have control over their learning increases their engagement. Again this is great news for my research because student choice is an autonomy-support strategy, Finally, the last article I found this week is called Effect of Choice on Cognitive and Affective Engagement. In this article the researchers studied if providing students with a choice of assignment increased their effective engagement, relating to how successful they were in learning the material, and their affective engagement, relating to how much they enjoyed completing the assignments. They found, surprisingly that student choice has no effect on effective engagement, but had a positive effect on affective engagement. This meant that students enjoyed completing the assignment more when they were given a choice, but they did not learn the material better. This is surprising because many other studies have found affective and effective engagement being highly correlated. I believe that the reason the researchers got these results is because they were not providing students with a meaningful choice. Self-determination theory states that people work harder for something that is meaningful to them. I think that when providing students with choice in the classroom, it is important that we provide them with a meaningful choice.
3 Comments
Christina Schreiber
11/13/2017 10:31:19 am
It is interesting that not all studies support each other on this topic. You hear all the time that student choice and student autonomy are best for our students. I am interested to see how your data matches up with the previous studies. I wonder if the differences in content being taught in the various studies had anything to do with their results.
Reply
Teresa Barron
11/13/2017 01:51:32 pm
I am looking forward to seeing your results and how they correlate with previous studies. I agree with your comment that we as educators must give students choices, but they must be meaningful choices in order for outcomes to be beneficial for students.
Reply
Jane Gallagher
11/13/2017 04:37:36 pm
I would love to increase my students' self determination and intrinsic drive. I find your topic very interesting and look forward to reading about your study. Just last week I sat down with my 6th grade ELD students and surveyed them for topics of interest they would like to study. My current curriculum topics aren't doing it for them and I need to get them pumped up again. My students came up with some great ideas that are interesting and would be fun. I am going to rewrite some lessons and observe what happens.
Reply
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorI am a fourth grade teacher in Vacaville, California. Archives
November 2017
Categories |