How do we bring the findings on motivation to the classroom?
A few of the readings/videos for this week described the phenomenon that when a reward is placed for the production of good work, it inhibits our ability to do well. They also state that allowing people to work on projects that they came up with and are interested in facilitated immense imagination and superb results. But how does this information translate to the classroom?
In most classroom environments, student passively learn information and reproduce that knowledge on an exam to ‘prove’ that they ‘learned’ it. While I think most of us agree that the majority of students are memorizing for the short-term and not learning for the long-term, the students still need to be taught information and take the time to understand it. It’s hard for them to be imaginative in producing a product pertaining to class information if they don’t already know it. So, how can we take this information that we know from learning and assessment and apply it to our learning environments?
I think we need to take an interdisciplinary approach to teach students and ensure that they are taking in the information. First, students will have to be taught in a very typical manner. But after going over information, instructions can have the students work in groups or by themselves on example problems or have a class discussion. Instructors should also ensure that when they are going over problems in class that they are of similar difficulty to that of the homework or exams. If the difficulty level is much higher on homework and exams than what was presented by the teacher, students feel that they are not grasping the content and lose motivation.
In the last couple weeks of the class, instructors could stop assigning traditional problem based homework move to a group of individual project. But, instead of assigning a specific project, the instructor could ask the students to come up with a project of a certain criteria and present it to them before they begin work on it. This could facilitate students doing work on projects that they are motivated by.
In all of this, I am still unsure of how to approach grading. I feel that students will remain unmotivated in interacting with the material if they are not given a grade. However, I think that presenting material and going over problems that is commensurate withe the level that is found on homework and exams will aide in the stress students feel towards grades. In addition, we should have less of an emphasis on bell curves and failing people and use grades as a way to prove to ourselves that we are good teachers. If our students have an 85% average in the class, they will be happier and feel more respected, and we can take that as an indicator that we are doing well because our students are learning.