The Motives for Learning in Elementary Students: The Parents and Teachers Agency | Chapter 09 | Perspectives of Arts and Social Studies Vol. 1
According to conception of cultural and
historical development, motives represent essential structural component of any
kind of activity. Learning at school is a kind of collective joint activity
according to activity theory. Motives might be conformed and evaluated during
learning process as its essential element. Different motive might be acquired
during interactions within learning process. Pupils might share their
motives, but also
might present differential
variants of combinations
of types motives: external and
internal motives. The
objective of this
chapter is consideration
of formation and assessment of motives of pupils. The
authors propose the qualitative way of analysis of the sphere of motives by
specifically organized interview with teachers and parents. The procedure of
interactive drawings with pupils is proposed as a new and original way for
analysis of motives. The study was accomplished
in a private
school in the
Puebla city, Mexico, with
the pupils of the third
grade of primary school.
The results show
the presence of
both external and
internal motives in
pupils. External motives can be divided
into three groups:
motives, which support
the learning process, motives, which are indifferent to
the learning process and motives, which become serious obstacles for cognition.
Different strategies of analysis of the motives permit to understand better
participation of different factors in conformation of the sphere of motives at
school age. The data of the study have pointed
out that the
methods of qualitative
assessment permitted to
obtain important information about the sphere of motivation of
pupils for learning activity as internal motives of learning activity. Other motives
were external and were related to diverse external aspects of school live as
friends, classroom, kindness of the teacher,
playing games and so on.
Positive external motivation
is the predominant type of school
motivation within included population of the third school grade of private
primary school. Three
initial years of
education at primary
school are not enough for formation
of internal motives of study. At the same time, it is possible to
observe that positive attitude of parents and teacher may influence on positive
motives of the pupils. In all observed cases, we may conclude the presence of
positive motivation of children. The motivation of the pupils was external and
internal types. The motivation of the teacher was academic and internal. The
motivation of the parents was positive of both external and internal types,
exactly as the children. We might conclude that system of teaching based on
activity theory is capable of introducing of initial positive motivation in pupils
and teacher therefor it is possible to expect gradual changes of children’s
motivation into profound internal interest for future studies.
Author(s) Details
Yulia Solovieva
Puebla Autonomous
University, Mexico.
Adriana Mata
Program in Educational
Sciences, Iberoamericana University, Puebla, Mexico.
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