What Is Intrinsic Motivation?
Intrinsic motivation means that the student's learning purpose is directed to the learning activity itself. The learning activity itself can make the students get emotional satisfaction and thus produce a sense of success. Intrinsic motivation provides a natural force for learning and development. It stimulates behavior without external rewards and stress. People measure an individual's intrinsic motivation by whether he or she chooses to perform or insist on an activity, or by evaluating his or her interest or preference in a particular activity. Internal motivation plays a vital role in whether an individual can be creative in the field in which he or she is engaged. Intrinsic motivation is the germination of scientific research and the internal motivation of scientific research. As we age, children's internal motivations change.
Intrinsic motivation means that the student's learning purpose is directed to the learning activity itself. The learning activity itself can make the students get emotional satisfaction and thus produce a sense of success. Intrinsic motivation provides a natural force for learning and development. It stimulates behavior without external rewards and stress. People measure an individual's intrinsic motivation by whether he or she chooses to perform or insist on an activity, or by evaluating his or her interest or preference in a particular activity. Internal motivation plays a vital role in whether an individual can be creative in the field in which he or she is engaged. Intrinsic motivation is the germination of scientific research and the internal motivation of scientific research. As we age, children's internal motivations change.
- Chinese name
- Intrinsic motivation
- Foreign name
- IntrinsicMotivation
- Applied discipline
- psychology
- Application range
- Educational psychology
Intrinsic motivation definition
Intrinsic motivation means that the student's learning purpose is directed to the learning activity itself. The learning activity itself can make the students get emotional satisfaction and thus produce a sense of success. Intrinsic motivation provides a natural force for learning and development. It stimulates behavior without external rewards and stress. For example, even without external rewards and stress, interest can motivate a child to read a book, and competence can make a child challenged. Intrinsic motivation can provide students with an intrinsic motivational power, enabling students to take the necessary efforts to exercise and develop skills and abilities. The opposite of intrinsic motivation is extrinsic motivation, which is motivated by external rewards and rewards.
Intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation often seem to be the same behavior. Students can read, draw, or answer questions in the classroom, both internal motivation and external motivation. The substantial differences between the two are the sources that provide behavioral motivation and direct behavior. Internally inspired behavior, the source of student activity is personal curiosity, needs, and efforts; externally inspired behavior, the source of student activity is events that occur in the environment.
Prior to the 1950s, a large amount of research on motivation focused on external motivations. External reinforcement is generally considered to be a necessary condition for stimulating external motivations. Under reinforcement conditions, individuals will have expectations of the next step of reinforcement to obtain external reinforcement As the goal of individual behavior. For example, students strive to do good deeds in order to get praise from teachers, and work hard to avoid parental punishment. In 1960, Bruner (J.S. Bruner) emphasized the role of "internal motivation" in the book "Educational Process", thinking that intrinsic motivation is the real motivation to promote learning. Since then, people have begun to attach importance to internal motivation for learning Impact. [1]
Measurement of intrinsic motivation
People measure an individual's intrinsic motivation by whether he or she chooses to perform or insist on an activity, or by evaluating his or her interest or preference in a particular activity. Mitchell (1993) referred to this assessment as the "inner interest" assessment.
Some researchers have compiled questionnaires to evaluate the relatively stable individual differences in students' intrinsic motivation in academic achievement activities. For example, Harter (1981) developed a scale to measure the four dimensions related to intrinsic motivation: (1) whether learning is inspired by curiosity or to please teachers; (2) whether you like to work independently or rely on teachers' help (3) whether the task is to be judged independently or by the teacher; (4) the internal and external criteria of success or failure (for example, scores, teacher feedback). For each dimension, she is divided into two categories: internal orientation and external orientation. Table 1 is an example of some items of the scale.
Table 1: Examples of Hart's intrinsic motivation questionnaire items
For me Very much in line | section meets the |
|
| very much meets the | section meets the |
|
| Partial challenge | Prefer easy jobs |
|
|
4 | 3 | Some children like new jobs with harder levels to please teachers / get points | Other children are more willing to do very easy work curiosity / interest | 2 | 1 |
4 | 3 | Some children do extra homework to get better scores Rely on teachers | Other children do extra homework because they find learning to be fun Independent mastery | 2 | 1 |
1 | 2 | When some children encounter difficulties in their studies, they ask the teacher for help Relying on Teachers' Judgments | Other children try to solve the problem by themselves Independent judgment | 2 | 1 |
1 | 2 | Some children think teachers should decide what they should do Internal standard | Other children think they should decide for themselves what to do External standard | 3 | 4 |
4 | 3 | Some children also know if they are doing well in school when they have no grades | Other children need grades to know if they are doing well | 2 | 1 |
Teachers can also evaluate students' intrinsic motivation by observing their behavior in different task situations. The behaviors associated with high levels of intrinsic interest are listed in Table 2.
Table 2: Behaviors related to intrinsic motivation
Inspired students:
Start your own learning activities
Likes challenging tasks or pursues challenging aspects of tasks
Spontaneously associate school learning with activities or interests outside the school
Asked questions beyond the task at hand-extending their knowledge beyond the lessons learned today
Exceed requirements
Reluctant to stop working on tasks they did not complete
Tasks that are outstanding for external reasons (such as grades, close to teacher supervision) will work
Smile and seem to enjoy working now
When you get results, show pride
Of course, the most direct and least used strategy is to simply ask students what they are interested in in various school tasks. Teachers can compile some short questionnaires, asking students to evaluate what they are interested in in class (as shown in Table 3), or to give an open question, asking students to discuss them in school in the form of group discussions What activities do you like and dislike? Asking these questions gives students an important message that their perspective is valuable.
Table 3: Examples of intrinsic motivation questionnaires prepared by a teacher
Please rate the following activities in your class and how much you like them.
Do problems on math book Do math text problems on blackboard Read the story on the reading book Answer questions after reading book chapters Do scientific design Write a story Listen to the teacher tell a story Writing class news | Don't like it at all 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 |
Intrinsic motivation
Internal motivation plays a vital role in whether an individual can be creative in the field in which he or she is engaged. "The principle of intrinsic motivation is the sociopsychological basis of creativity," Emmerbill said. "People are most creative when they are inspired by the satisfaction and challenges of the job itself, not by external pressure." If Individuals have a high level of internal motivation, they will proactively propose tasks, actively search the current situation and the existing knowledge and experience of individuals to produce various possible responses; even if they are disturbed by external stimuli (such as competition, evaluation, etc.) ), Will also maintain an open mind, can acutely perceive the more hidden major clues related to problem solving in the stimulus, dare to take risks, be challenging, and have novel, unique and fluent thinking, so as to creatively solve problems. A large amount of research by American social psychologist Amabile (1988, 1995) has proved that internal motivation has a great promotion effect on human creativity. Crochefield's research also points out that a high level of intrinsic motivation is an important feature of outstanding creative talent.
Intrinsic motivation is the germination of scientific research and the internal motivation of scientific research. On April 23, 1918, at the 60th birthday of the famous German physicist Planck, Einstein gave a famous lecture on the motivation of exploration:
"There are many houses in the temple of science. The people who live there are all kinds of people, and the motivations to guide them there are different. There are many people who love science because science gives them super It's about the intellectual pleasure of ordinary people. Science is their own special entertainment. In this entertainment, they seek the experience of living activities and the satisfaction of ambition. In this temple, there are many other people who put their brain power. The product was consecrated on the altar for purely utilitarian purposes. If God had angels running out to drive all those who belonged to these two groups out of the temple, then the number of people gathered there would be greatly reduced ....
If there were only two types of people in the temple that we had just expelled, then this temple would never exist, just as the grass alone would not make it a forest. Because, for such people, whenever they have the opportunity, they will do any field of human activity; whether they become engineers, officials, businessmen or scientists depends entirely on the environment. Now let's take a look at those who are beloved by angels. Most of them are rather weird, dumb and lonely people. Despite these common characteristics, they are actually very different from each other and not similar to each other like the many people who are driven away. What exactly led them to this temple? First of all, I agree with Schopenhauer that one of the strongest motivations to lead people to art and science is to escape the disgusting vulgarity and despair of daily life, and to get rid of people's own capriciousness. Desire of Desire. A well-trained person is always eager to escape from personal life and enter the world of objective perception and thinking; this desire is like the people in the city eager to escape the hustle and bustle of the crowded environment and enjoy the quiet life on the mountain. ...
In addition to this negative motivation, there is also a positive motivation. People always wanted to draw a simplified and comprehensible image of the world in the most appropriate way; so he tried to use his world system to replace the world of experience and conquer it. This is what painters, poets, speculative philosophers, and natural scientists do, and they do it their own way. An individual regards the world system and its composition as the fulcrum of his emotional life, in order to thereby find the tranquility and stability that he cannot find in the narrow scope of his personal experience. "
Undoubtedly, this kind of non-utilitarian, scientific and scientific motivation for what Einstein called is intrinsic motivation. Einstein believes that, like Planck, he is the third person in the Temple of Science. The purpose of scientific research is to pursue an objective description of natural phenomena and reveal their internal laws. The beauty of science is the harmony of the world system, revealing that this harmony is the source of endless perseverance and patience of scientists. Einstein devoted himself to establishing unified field theory in his later years because the orthodox interpretation of quantum mechanics led by Bohr could not satisfy the harmony of the world system.
Intrinsic motivation has led scientists to take professional research as their own career and set their own goals for the struggle. With the increase of the age and knowledge of scientists, their intrinsic motivation is becoming less and less, and new phenomena will be simply judged without thinking based on the existing knowledge. As a result, some great discoveries will easily slip away from them. For example, when Joliot-Curie bombarded the element beryllium with alpha particles, he found a very strong ray. He did not delve into it, thinking that it was just an ordinary ray, and thus missed the discovery of neutrons. Find). Liebich once extracted iodine from seaweed, and a dark brown layer of liquid was precipitated in the extracted mother liquor. Libbich didn't pay attention to this strange phenomenon, and thus missed the discovery of bromine. De found).
Intrinsic motivation development
Except for a certain age, there are individual differences in intrinsic motivation. As children grow up, these tendencies appear to be systematically different. Hart found that in her questionnaire, the scores on the three subscales: preference for challenges, curiosity and interest, and independent mastery showed a downward trend from the third grade to the ninth grade; while independent judgment and the internal standard scale The scores are increasing with age and school experience. Other studies have also shown that with age, students are less and less engaged in academic activities based on their own happiness, and they are better able to judge the nature of their grades.
We can guess the reason for these conversions. First, studying the damaging effects of extrinsic motivation on extrinsic motivation suggests that lower-grade students' interest in engaging in tasks in order to develop their abilities may be replaced by extrinsic rewards (eg, high scores) as they age. Secondly, students 'competence in mastering academic tasks will decrease with age, and low competence perception weakens students' intrinsic interest in academic tasks. The third reason is the emphasis on the score, which changes the achievement situation. For example, as grades increase, school evaluations may place more emphasis on high scores and be less tolerant of errors. Eccles & Midgley (1989) argues that as grades increase, schools become more restrained, more evaluative, and more competitive. A longitudinal study by Hart et al. (1992) showed that after entering primary school from primary school, students perceive that secondary school places more emphasis on evaluation, performance, and social comparison than primary school. Moreover, those students who perceived more emphasis on these variables scored higher on extrinsic motivation. [2]
