Arousal and Motivational Theories

Arousal Theories

• Primary motives are physical needs like thirst, exhaustion, hunger, heat, and cold.
• Secondary motives are learned through experience, for example, motivation for religion, brushing hair, or using a cell phone.
• Stimulation involves heightening experiences and going beyond basic needs and incentives.
• Optimal performance occurs when arousal and motivation reach a certain point and then decline.
• The optimal arousal level for performance varies individually.
• Too much stress and arousal can lead to procrastination.
• Optimal stress and arousal varies by the type of arousal and task.

Value and Expectation

• Motivation results from the amount of value multiplied by expectation.
• Value refers to the importance or worth of a task.
• Expectation refers to one's expectation for success and perceived odds of success.
• The equation is Value x Expectation = Motivation, resulting in a possibility between 0 and 1.
• If any factor (value or expectation) is 0, then there is no motivation to do the task.
• Intrinsic factors, like disliking a task, can hinder value.
• Extrinsic factors, like too much stress, can hinder value.
• Negative feedback can hinder expectations.
• Increasing value involves finding intrinsic motivation and identifying skill development.
• Increasing expectations involves breaking a task down into smaller parts.

Bandura's Social Learning Theory

• Learning occurs through imitation after observing a model.
• Self-efficacy, one's belief in their ability to complete a task, relates to motivation.
• Self-efficacy is determined by vicarious experiences (watching others) and feedback from others.

Cognitive Dissonance

• Cognitive dissonance occurs when what we know or believe does not match what we are experiencing or learning.
• Motivation is linked to reducing cognitive dissonance to better understand discrepancies.
• Cognitive dissonance can be reduced by changing beliefs, changing behavior, or compromising on beliefs and behaviors.
• A defense mechanism against cognitive dissonance is denying its existence, also known as isolation.

Weiner's Locus of Control or Attributions

• Task completion relies on past experiences.
• Successes and failures are attributed to various factors.
• Motivation is affected by past successes and failures.
• Motivation is impacted by whether we were successful in the past and why.
• Motivation remains even after failures.
• The locus (internal or external), stability, and control are three independent components that affect motivation.
• Locus refers to the location or source of the attribution, being internal (something you possess) or external (something the environment or someone else provided).
• Stability refers to whether the factors leading to an attribution will be present again.
• Control relates to whether practice is a controllable attribution.

Examples of Locus of Control or Attributions

• Seth attributes his test success to unstable, uncontrollable luck (external locus).
• Steve attributes his test failure to his lack of intelligence, an internal, stable, and uncontrollable factor.
• Sally attributes her poor test performance to not studying, which is internal, unstable, and controllable.
• Sandra attributes her success to the teacher liking her, which is an external, controllable, and stable factor.

Attributions

• Accurate attributions may not always be the most motivating.
• Balancing honesty with motivational attributions is important.
• Encouragement can be motivating.
• Motivation is easier after success and harder after failure.

Trait Theory

• Trait theory looks at general motivational trends over time.
• Achievement and affiliation are considered significant motivators.
• n(Ach) represents the need for achievement, which drives people to work towards personal goals.
• n(Aff) represents the need for affiliation, and to know how much time was spent because of a need for affiliation.
• n(Ach) + n(Aff) = 100 and are the most commonly used.
• The "healthiest" motivator depends on personal goals, emphasizing achievement or affiliation.
• Knowing an individual's general trends in affiliation and need helps motivate them toward their goals.

Types of Goal Orientation

• Helpless goal orientation involves barriers preventing task completion.
• Performance-avoidance goal orientation aims to avoid appearing foolish.
• Work-avoidance goal orientation focuses on doing the minimum to finish.
• Social goal orientation is motivated by affiliation or impressing someone.
• Performance-approach goal orientation is motivated by wanting to be the best.
• Mastery goal orientation is motivated by self-improvement.

Entity vs. Incremental Ability/Intelligence

• Carol Dweck's (2000) book is titled Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.
• Ability/intelligence can be viewed as a fixed entity or a changeable increment.
• Viewing intelligence as a changeable increment increases expectations, desires, and motivation to try or practice.
• A fixed mindset inhibits motivation for improvement.
• Performance goals are related to a fixed mindset, while mastery goals are related to a changeable mindset.
• Fixed and changeable mindsets relate to views of being "good" or "bad."

Incremental Views

• Praising, encouragement, recognition, and effort increases incremental views.
• Redefining failure as a learning opportunity can increase incremental views.

Optimal Experiences and Flow

• Flow is related to the perceived challenge of the task and the perception of one's skill level.
• It is important to be neither apathetic nor uncaring.
• The challenges in promoting flow involves your perception of skill level and the challenge of the task
• Breaking down goals and practicing mindfulness can promote work flow.

Self Regulation

• Goal setting, monitoring goals, self-reflection, self-evaluation, and strategy use are components of self regulation.
• Strengthening weaknesses, recognizing strengths, and using mnemonics or rewards systems are forms of strategy use.

Climate Variables

• Order and safety, emphasis on success, and appropriate level of challenge promotes better climate variables.
• Expectations should be generally understood, processes consistent, and safety to explore boundaries maintained.
• This ensures people maintain some flow state.

Task Comprehension

• Understanding the task is the focus.
• An understanding of what you're supposed to be doing is motivating.

How Teachers Can Increase Motivation

• The personal efficacy of the teacher allows students to do well and offer them unique challenges.
• Self evaluation improves skills.
• Teachers can model self-regulation by talking about goals and areas of improvement.
• Enthusiasm for learning should be presented by the teacher but they should remain caring.
• Expectations should be maintained since next time will be better

Instructional Variables

• Focus and organization.
• Personalization/relevance to what they are learning.
• Involvement - having learners involved in the learning, interactive, activities, group discussion.
• Constructive feedback.

The Power of Yet

• Kids who persisted when they faced challenges used the language "I don't get it yet."
• Kids who were giving up would say "I don't get it."

Specific Motivation Issues

• Low achievement with low expectations can be addressed by asking why they don't have high expectations.
• High anxiety can be addressed by breaking down information and using anxiety-reducing techniques.
• Threatened self-worth can be addressed by pointing out the benefits of what they would gain.
• Don't let them base their self worth off of a failure because they can learn from it.
• Procrastinators can be helped by encouraging time management techniques and breaking up the tasks.
• Perfectionists can feel anxiety related to procrastination because of the failure to meet an impossible standard.

Hard to Reach Low Achievement

• When students identify with the difficulty that is holding them back they can begin addressing it.
• Break down goals into small but still challenging goals so that they feel they accomplished something.

Bruner's Conceptual Understanding

• Concepts are our ideas or understandings of our experiences.
• Concept formation happens instantly and can take years to perfect as we define and provide clear examples.
• Concept maps offer a visual representation of a concept's hierarchical organization.
• Prototype matching compares the item with similar items in a category
• Hypotheses are developed about concepts.

Cognitive Approaches to Learning: Types of Transfer

• Transfer refers to applying something learned to another situation.
• Near transfer doesn't require much thought (ex: driving two small cars).
• Far transfer requires more thought about applying what was learned (ex: driving a truck after driving a car).
• Low road transfer are skills transferred automatically without thinking.
• High road transfer requires reflection and experience.
• Forward-reaching transfer involves thinking about how to use information in the future.
• Backward-reaching transfer involves connecting new information to something from the past through learning.
• Sometimes transfer is not possible given no connection to the past or a lack of use-case.

Factors That Affect Transfer

• Contextual similarities: the more similarities between the situation and learning, the easier the transfer.
• The use of examples is more effective learning than simply using definitions.
• Depth of learning actively engages students and enables deeper learning.
• Addressing errors and misconceptions as you learn new things mitigates wrong approaches later on
• Timely feedback is helpful.
• Teaching, learning, and memory strategies facilitate transfer by having students apply teaching strategies.

Desirable Difficulties

• Massed practice, predictable processes with constant cues, blocked practice, immediate feedback, re-studying, correct answers, and inaccurate metacognitive monitoring are improvements over a long term learning.
• Spaced practice, variation in learning conditions, interleaved practice, delayed feedback, retrieval practice, and generation foster long-term learning.
• While the immediate feedback of performance techniques is beneficial, they are hard to maintain.
• Performance techniques are helpful for gaining motivation, however, long-term learning is affected.
• Failures and frustrations negatively affect the student's motivation which is why some reviewers think they are repetitive and wasteful.

Issues in Decision Making

• Confirmation bias confirm what we already believe.
• Belief perseverance is what happens when we refuse to rethink our beliefs.
• Overconfidence bias: You are so confident, you don't bother checking.
• Hindsight bias: After a decision, the realization that your decision wasn't the best.

Heuristics in Decision Making

• Heuristics are shortcuts or rules of thumb.
• Availability heuristic: Salience leads us to believe instances are more common than they are.
• Representativeness heuristic: relying on similarities to known situations in uncertain situations lessens true possibilities.

Problem Solving

• Problem solving often precedes decision making.
• These often occur together and are determined by the ability to find and frame problems.
• We can develop great strategies by using certain components.
• *Subgoaling: Breaking up a big problem in to smaller pieces
• *Algorithms: very defined segments, like math problems or recipies
• *Means-ends analysis: (backwards strategy) how much money do I need, how many shifts do I need to work to pay for the car?

Approaches to Problem Solving, Successively

• Trial and Error: If you identify a solution, you try one and if it doesn't work, you try another.
• Focus Gambling: Identify a solution, usually due to lack of resrouces, you try one solution and if it doesn't work, you stop.
• Conservative Focus: What we tend to use if we have some experience, we organize by lielihood and we reevaluate if it doesn't work
• Simultaneous scanning: resources are used and we can do them all at once.

Obstacles to Problem Solving

• Fixation: Being so focused on one thing causes you to fail to see what's there
• Lack of motivation: Can't get started
• Lack of persistence: Can't continue
• Inadequate emotional control: Emotions get in the way.

Creative Thinking

• Creative thinking uses unique approaches.
• Convergent thinking encourages learners to take opinions and variety of backgrounds to a common understanding.
• Divergent thinking enables more freedom.
• Both can promote creative thought but divergent thinking is more commonly creative.
• Domain-relevant skills involve having a background.
• Encourage creativity.
• Intrinsic task motivation: It is more likely to be creative when we enjoy something.

Critical Thinking

• It is the analysis and evaluating information.
• Work with learners and present criticisms and opposing viewpoints to encourage critical thinking.

Constructivism

• Constructivism says learners should create their own knowledge and that past experiences, culture, and language construct our knowledge.

Assumptions

• Expertise exists and that the responsibilty of learning in on the learner.
• We can grow from the foundation.

Two Basic Types of Constructivism

• Cognitive constructivism includes a view of children as "little scientists."
• Schemas organize information or concepts.
• Equilibration balances cognition.
• Assimilation is when new information fits into existing schemas.
• Accommodation changes the basic schema

Types of Concepts

• These are classifications for some concepts, not all fit all these, these may be combinations.
• Conjunctive concepts use multiple reasons for belonging.
• Disjunctive means there are multiple requirements that are considered as the concept.
• Relational: Concepts relate to some standard.

Promoting Concept Formation

• When the rules and examples are used right, students learn what concepts are and are not.
• Providing clear examples that relate to existing maps helps students better understand.
• Generate Hypothesis or Predictions about where concepts may be useful.
• Check for student understanding and generalization.

Vygotsky's Social Cognition

• Learning occurs through working with others.
• Understanding and learning in social negotiation relies on others.

Approaches of Social Constructivism

• Scaffolding slowly removes supports as students learn
• Service learning is the construct of our learning.
• Problem-based learning applies real-life situations to new learning.
• Cooperative learning relies on small group collaborations.