Читать книгу Student Engagement Techniques - Elizabeth F. Barkley - Страница 29

Students' expectations are inextricably linked with their self-perceptions. Students must have confidence that, with appropriate effort, they can succeed. If there is no hope, there is no motivation. Cross and Steadman (1996) discuss three motivational theories that address student expectations: self-efficacy theories, attribution theory, and self-worth models. Self-efficacy theories (Bandura, 1977, 1982; Corno & Mandinach, 1983) suggest that students' beliefs about their ability to succeed at a learning task are more important than their actual skill levels or the difficulty of the task. If a student is confident in her ability to perform a task successfully, she will be motivated to engage in it.

Attribution theory (Weiner, 1974, 1985, 1986) suggests that students attribute success or failure to a variety of factors such as ability, effort, luck, fatigue, the ease or difficulty of the exam, and so forth, and that their belief is shaped by their perceptions of why they have succeeded or failed in the past. For example, if success is dependent on attributes over which they have control (effort), students are more likely to have confidence than when success is dependent on external conditions over which they have no control (difficulty of the exam). Three important dimensions of attributions include locus (whether failure or success is attributed to causes internal or external to the learner); stability (whether the attributed cause is permanent or temporary); and controllability (whether the learner has the power to influence success or failure).

Finally, self-worth models propose that people are strongly motivated to preserve their sense of self-worth. When students don't succeed, they would prefer to question—and have others question—their effort (they're “lazy”) rather than their ability (they're “dumb”) (Brown & Weiner, 1984; Cross, 2001). Based on this model, it is easier to understand why some students don't even try to accomplish a task if they believe there is low probability that they will be successful.

Covington (1993) found four typical student patterns that resonate with the experience many college teachers have interacting with students in the classroom. Success-oriented students are serious learners who want to perform well, and they usually do. They are predisposed toward engagement, as they enjoy learning for learning's sake. They find personal satisfaction in challenging assignments because they are accustomed to success and are able to preserve their perceptions of self-worth even in the event of an occasional failure. Overstrivers are also successful students and will take on challenging tasks, but they are not entirely confident in their ability, and consequently worry constantly about their grades and performance. Anxious that each new learning task will be the one that exposes the lower levels of ability that they have so far been able to conceal, they compensate by expending a great deal of effort to ensure that they do succeed. Failure-avoiders also suffer anxiety, but because they have not always been successful in school, they are afraid that if they fail at a specific learning activity, they will prove to themselves and others that they lack the ability to succeed. In order to preserve their sense of self-worth, they avoid tasks that are too challenging. Finally, failure-accepting students have become so accustomed and resigned to academic failure that they feel hopeless. They respond to learning tasks with indifference (school is irrelevant and unworthy of their efforts) or even antagonism, and they are neither satisfied with success nor dissatisfied with failure (Cross & Steadman, 1996, pp. 79–84). In short, they have disengaged from the learning process.

Although the role of expectancy has received considerable attention in the study of student motivation, “value” is still a critical variable. Students are making the sacrifices necessary to get a college education because they believe in the value of the learning, the value of the degree, or both. Therefore, in our efforts to promote student engagement, it is useful to look at what the research says about how the concept of value influences student motivation.