Home Our Blog Encouragement can keep children engaged in education. Articles for parents. Related Posts Latest. Perseverance and strength of character are critical to ensuring that children give their all to tasks and are able to deal with a number of challenges. As we are in the thick of exams, you may be concerned you will struggle to remain focused throughout, here are a few tips to help you to do so.
It's easy to feel demotivated at this time of the year, once the festivities are over but it's still cold outside. Making a conscious effort to provide wait time also removes the pressure of needing to be the first to find the answer. When students come to realise that their teacher will always wait 5 seconds or so before calling on a student rather than always calling on the first hand up, they will be more likely to engage with the struggle of thinking through the problem.
Finally, by keeping the emphasis on progress rather than scores, growth mindset pushes students to continually challenge themselves and reflect on their improvement.
Encourage self-efficacy. Students who are paralysed by low academic self-confidence will struggle to drive their own motivation. A sense of competence is enhanced through optimal challenges. As the student practises this new skill or concept, the teacher slowly removes their structured support, making it more and more difficult. This slow removal of support, paired with positive reinforcement and opportunities to receive support along the way, keeps students at this level of optimal challenge as they improve.
Consistent small successes will further enhance motivation. Students often base their view of their own competence on how they believe their teacher views them.
Therefore, teacher observations of student effort encourage a sense of competence, as well as pointing out how far the student has come in their learning. When students have a firm sense that they are regarded as competent, they will be more likely to treat learning like play, making mistakes and taking risks. Threats and unyielding deadlines tend to diminish this orientation towards play-like learning.
Students may give up because they falsely believe that, if they were going to succeed, it would be easy. Teachers can disentangle this misconception by providing examples of failures that well-known individuals overcame along their journey towards success. Emphasising the value of asking for help may catch students who are falling behind and becoming disengaged from the material. Finally, modeling the struggle through your own words and actions can be a powerful example to students.
A pressure to compete tends to diminish motivation unless the two students are and perceive themselves to be equally competent: if a student at the top of the class is pitted against a student who is struggling, the latter student may feel that there is no reason to try.
This is not to say that class or school-wide competitions should be avoided. When broader competitions are more open-ended, students can creatively self-guide their projects, and will feel a stronger sense of intrinsic motivation.
Differentiating tasks so they are appropriately challenging allows students to maintain optimal engagement. When students are working just within their current ability, they are drawn in by their curiosity to find the answer and spurred by the belief that they can find the answer.
Teachers can also encourage students to set authentic learning goals rather than performance goals. Students can practise using mastery-orientation language when writing weekly, monthly, or long-term goals. Teachers can reinforce mastery-orientation by modeling it in their own goal setting. Despite the popular idea that fidgets or music support student focus, brains generally need quiet or ambient noise to stay engaged. Higher level brain functions such as creativity and critical thinking are inextricably linked to a state of flow, so students who are constantly interrupted will never be able to reach this level of highly motivated thinking.
Therefore, independent and collaborative work should occur at separate times, or in separate spaces if they must occur simultaneously. Some learning is simply not particularly interesting, and no amount of differentiation can make every learning experience enjoyable for every student all of the time.
External rewards such as long-term career goals and teacher approval are realistic external rewards that teachers can use. However, when deciding whether to use external motivation, it is important to keep certain principles in mind. Tangible rewards are often counterproductive, and the more external the reward, the less inherently valuable the student will find the activity.
Even when students complete an activity for the inherent value they see in it, and are given an unexpected reward, they later regard their motivation for doing the activity as more extrinsically motivated than students who were not given a reward.
Students who believe that they can succeed are more likely to reach their goals. However, it is important that students consider what may go wrong in order to avoid being emotionally devastated when they encounter setbacks. In fact, letting students know that they will encounter setbacks, and that they are entirely normal, takes away some of their sting in the moment.
In addition, students who consider hurdles before taking on a challenge are able to make a plan regarding how to continue moving forward. It is deeply valuable to emphasise to students that obstacles will always come up, but that what is important is to learn from these obstacles rather than to dwell on them. While formal school-wide social-emotional assessments are valuable for collecting comprehensive data, these measures are time-consuming and cannot practically be implemented more than once or twice each year.
For these formal assessments, one reliable measure with strong evidence of validity is the Panorama Social-Emotional Learning Survey. However, on a fortnightly or monthly basis, teachers can informally gauge student motivation by asking the following questions:. How often do you do the following?
These questions are suitable for verbal or written check-ins. When scoring written check-ins, items 4, 6, and 7 should be reverse-scored. It is also prudent to consider not only the level of motivation a student has but their form of motivation. Is the student more intrinsically or extrinsically motivated, or somewhere in between?
With this knowledge, we can use the above strategies to nudge the students towards more internal motivation by developing their sense of competency and control over their learning, as well as doing what we can to draw students in with interesting content.
Anderman, E. In Handbook of research on student engagement pp. Springer: Boston, MA. Deci, E. They find satisfaction in the innate rewards of learning. This attitude guides their achievement behavior, which emphasizes contextualized learning. Intrinsically or mastery oriented students engage with the content, their peers, and faculty, netting a longer retention span and a greater ability to use what they learn.
Such students are independent, lifelong learners Chasteuneuf, In contrast, students with extrinsic or performance orientation concern themselves with achievement chiefly in relation to their peers Vansteenkiste and Lens, They use rote memorization and study for immediate gain according to what they expect to see on a test.
These behaviors may be observed in students enrolled in introductory-level courses or general education requirements. Such learning carries a brief life expectancy and is superficial Ames, Extrinsically motivated students are seeking benefits such as grades, positive feedback or other indicators of teacher approval. Many such students openly disclose the incentives that motivate their efforts, such as maintaining a grade average to preserve financial aid, fulfilling exam requirements, improving career prospects, or winning the approval of significant others.
Considerable time was taken with these measures to ensure that the response requirements were fully understood and total administration time was around 15 minutes. In order to minimize answering bias e. In addition, we set up a filler item i.
In the first place, we employed SPSS software version In the second, the causal steps approach Baron and Kenny, was adopted to investigate the mediation role of reading self-concept in linking parent encouragement and reading motivation. This approach tests the regression coefficients for the effects of predictor on outcome Step 1 , predictor on mediator Step 2 , and mediator on outcome controlling for the predictor Step 3.
Since the causal steps approach does not directly test the mediating effect, and the sampling distribution of mediation effects is often skewed especially for small samples e.
As a resampling method, bootstrapping is especially useful when the behavior of a statistic over repeated sampling is either not known, too complicated to derive, or highly context dependent.
We can reject the null hypothesis of no mediation if the bootstrapped confidence interval does not contain zero. Descriptive statistics and correlations for the measured variables are presented in Table 1. As expected, parent encouragement, reading self-concept, and reading motivation were positively related to each other. Moreover, parent encouragement was negatively associated with place of residence, which indicated that students from urban areas had more parent encouragement than those from rural areas.
Age was found to be both negatively associated with parent encouragement and reading motivation, indicating that younger students had more parent encouragement and reading motivation.
Table 1. Means, standard deviations, and correlations among the study variables. Next, the mediation effect of reading self-concept on the association between parent encouragement and reading motivation was tested, and the results were presented in Table 2.
After controlling covariates i. The ratio of the mediation effect to the total effect was 0. Therefore, reading self-concept partially mediated the relation of parent encouragement and reading motivation. Accordingly, both Hypothesis 1 and Hypothesis 2 were supported.
As seen in Table 2 , after controlling covariates i. These observations suggested that both the direct and indirect association between parent encouragement and reading motivation was moderated by gender.
More specifically, this was a second stage moderated mediation model, which linked reading self-concept and reading motivation.
Thus, Hypotheses 3 was supported. A test of simple slopes was conducted to demonstrate more clearly how gender moderated the influence of parent encouragement and reading self-concept on reading motivation. Figure 2. Moderation effect of gender on the relationship between reading self-concept and reading motivation. RSC, reading self-concept. Figure 3. Moderation effect of gender on the relationship between parent encouragement and reading motivation. PE, parent encouragement. It is possible that parents who encourage their children to read spend more time interacting with their children in the context of reading, and express more positive emotions about reading activation.
When parents give encouragement, pupils will believe that reading has value and that they have the competency to read. Furthermore, higher reading self-concept usually means that pupils will regard reading as interesting, resulting in higher reading self-efficacy.
The possible reason is that girls might be peculiarly vulnerable to the proposed negative effects of personal encouragement resulting in subsequent failure. Traditional socialization practices are inclined to concentrate on dependence and interpersonal relationships for females, while independence and achievement for males Corpus and Lepper, Girls persistently demonstrated more positive attitudes toward recreational reading, and greater stability in reading attitudes over time than boys, and they also enjoyed reading significantly more than boys Marinak and Gambrell, In addition, they expressed different preferences to the types of books which they read.
Specifically, it was reported that boys preferred to read comic and humorous books while girls enjoyed reading adventure books. The present results showed that the relation between reading self-concept and reading motivation was stronger for females than males. This moderation effect is likely to be related to gender identity McGeown et al.
For example, children report that compared to their fathers, their mothers read more, and spend more time teaching them to read Millard, Compared with mathematics, science and sports, which are often seen as being more associated with being male, reading is usually regarded as a more feminine activity Meece et al. As a result, reading self-concept may affect reading motivation more strongly for girls than for boys.
Thus, those who have difficulty and failure in the initial reading period are usually hindered by the less rewarding process of developing basic competence in the lexical level.
It is necessary for future studies to cope with several limitations innate in the current research. Though pupils are more susceptible to their own motivation and self-concept than their parents are, at this age social desirability may be a greater influence on girls, whereas boys be tempted to present themselves as less compliant.
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