Intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation

Intrinsic motivation is engaging in a task because it’s satisfying or enjoyable (internal drive). Whereas, extrinsic motivation refers to those actions carried out to achieve some instrumental end (external rewards). So, it’s contingent upon the attainment of an outcome.

Because intrinsic motivation relates to personal goals and interests it has a long-term effect. When you’re intrinsically motivated you’re likely to target your growth, look beyond short-term setbacks, and work hard to achieve success.

This is what we want from our students. We want them to take a longer-term view and see that their effort and success should go beyond external validation.

But, how can you help your students build intrinsic motivation?

Here are 4 essential ways that can help you achieve this goal more successfully in your teaching.

1. Make learning stimulating and enjoyable

Students are likely to spend a great deal of time pursuing activities they enjoy. The more they find learning stimulating and enjoyable the more they get involved. Their involvement can turn into getting more engaged in learning further materials outside school.

So, we shouldn’t think that serious learning is supposed to be hard work while when it’s enjoyable it is not significant and a waste of time. Enjoyment can sustain students’ learning.

Yet, this doesn’t mean we are expected to turn everything into fun. We need to cover the curriculum and reach the intended learning outcomes. Besides, not all our teaching content may sustain students’ interest.

So, making learning interesting and enjoyable doesn’t necessarily mean changing everything to help students learn only what interests them. Rather, within what’s feasible we can find different ways to make learning more stimulating in many, if not most situations.

Here are some suggestions to achieve this.

• Do the ‘Unexpected

In our lessons, we shouldn’t focus only on the information flow (how we’re proceeding from one stage of the lesson to another), but also on the motivational flow.

So, from time to time, we need to vary the way we’re doing things in class: our presentation style, the learning materials, the classroom’s spatial organization, and the interaction patterns (not only teacher-students but also students-teacher, students-students, students-student, etc.).

Varying those aspects of teaching can help you sustain and maintain the motivational flow of your lessons.

So, do the unexpected occasionally and in a motivating way. You’ll make your students always willing to learn more about your content.

• Make the tasks more interesting

Besides varying the teaching aspects, it’s also essential to make the tasks interesting to break the monotony of learning.

But, what can you do with those curriculum topics/tasks that may not appeal to your students?

To raise task interest, connect the topic with the things your students find interesting. You can do this as an extension task or simply by adapting the existing task while maintaining the same objective.

To render your tasks more interesting, include the following elements:

The personal element: Learning about the everyday life of real people and relating that content to the students’ own lives.

The intriguing element: Problem-solving and challenging tasks can help capture students’ curiosity. For instance, tasks that involve finding hidden information, overcoming obstacles, discovering something, solving a conceptual conflict, etc.

The exotic element: This involves learning about unique places and people.

The fantasy element: Tasks that engage the student’s fantasy, using their imagination to create things.

The novelty element: There is something new, different, or unfamiliar about the activity.

Competitive element: The opportunity to compete can make students more excited about the task. Yet, create positive competition where losers don’t feel discouraged or upset.

Humorous element: Jokes and funny anecdotes can make learning more interesting.

2. Help students develop mastery orientation

Students who have a high mastery orientation focus on learning, improving, and growing, not on grades, competition, or appearances. They believe that intelligence can be developed. Even if they get poor feedback, they keep on working to achieve their goals and overcome the challenges.

So, unlike performance orientation, mastery orientation boosts intrinsic motivation because it can help students of all grade levels work through failures or setbacks and grow.

Encouraging mastery orientation can help teachers promote students’ intrinsic motivation in learning.

Here are some tips to help your students develop mastery orientation.

• Increase the students’ expectancy of success

If we believe we can succeed we will make more efforts to learn. Expectancy of success accompanied by positive values can develop mastery orientation since it fuels students’ intrinsic motivation and so makes them more resilient to reach their goals.

To increase students’ expectancy of success, you need first to explain to them the relevance of the teaching content/materials to their learning process and future careers. This will help them recognize that their efforts will pay off in the end.

It’s also necessary to make the success criteria as clear as possible for your students so that they know what’s expected of them and they can self-evaluate their learning. You can discuss those criteria with them, hand past tests/papers, and study the type of questions/items addressed and the answers required.

To make those criteria more explicit, model good performance. This is by inviting or using video recordings of peers/past students to demonstrate what students are expected to achieve.

In addition, providing sufficient preparation for the task can help students increase their success potential.

Such preparation involves equipping students with the necessary guidance and procedures to handle the task more successfully. It also includes making students aware of the possible obstacles/issues in advance and encouraging them to reflect and plan.

Ongoing assistance is required no matter what the nature of the task is. The more you interact with your students and provide guidance the more they feel more confident to engage in learning.

Effective cooperative tasks can also enhance the expectancy of success. When students cooperate and help each other, this can result in generating safety and a sense of assurance among the group members.

• Increase the students’ goal-orientedness

We often spend time detailing the objectives of each course we teach and preparing materials to get our students involved. Yet, those “class goals” we see as worth pursuing may not seem so for our students.

Even when we explain their relevance, students still have their personal goals.

To this end, to help students develop mastery orientation and get them more intrinsically motivated in learning you need to understand what goals they find worth pursuing.

Sharing their personal goals can help you understand the social motives that lie behind their goals and connect these with the academic ones.

To do so, encourage your students to negotiate their individual goals, and relate them to the “class goals”, outlining a common purpose and the intended outcomes.

Involving students in goal-setting is likely to make learning more relevant to their personal needs and motivate them to make further efforts to streamline.

• Provide motivational feedback

Another way to help students develop mastery orientation is by providing them with motivational feedback that boosts their confidence in learning.

For students to be able to focus on learning with rigour and determination, they need to have a positive social image and believe in themselves as students.

Self-esteem and self-confidence are considered the foundations of motivating students.

Therefore, teacher feedback can be a powerful motivational tool for students. It doesn’t only heighten and sustain effort in the face of failure, but it also inspires students to become lifelong learners.

3. Promote self-motivating strategies

To keep on learning and improving, students’ intrinsic motivation is necessary. Yet, when facing setbacks, distractions, competing for emotional states, etc., their motivation is likely to wane.

It’s critical therefore to help students to motivate themselves using the necessary self-motivating strategies such as controlling their emotions, eliminating negative environmental influences, and monitoring and controlling concentration.

How to help students use self-motivating strategies?

Besides raising students’ awareness of the importance of self-motivation, discuss with them which self-motivating strategies they’re using.

To help them understand these strategies, it’s also important to model them and provide a rationale for each strategy’s use.

Guided exercises or experiences can help students put the strategy into practice. Students can also share with their peers personalized self-motivating strategies and how these helped in the learning process.

4. Enhance students’ learning autonomy

Another necessary way to develop students’ intrinsic motivation is to enhance their learning autonomy. The latter doesn’t imply complete detachment of the teacher, but rather owing certain responsibility and control over the learning process.

Students’ autonomy is a prerequisite to their intrinsic motivation. Because when being autonomous, students learn how to learn and improve on their own. So, they get more self-determined and willing to invest in their learning beyond those academic rewards.

Developing students’ autonomy requires a shift in the teacher’s role from instructing to facilitating. As a facilitator, you’re not the sole provider of information but you help your students search, discover, reconstruct meaning, reflect, and monitor their progress.

Indeed, to enhance your students’ autonomy focus on increasing their involvement in the learning process. This is by encouraging their choices, voices, and contributions.

In this concern, peer teaching can be a great tool to make students feel responsible for supporting their peers to understand/practise new materials.

Similarly, project work can help make students more autonomous. When they are assigned roles they’ll function in an autonomous way to carry out the task.

Also, encouraging your students’ self-assessment can raise their awareness of their strengths, weaknesses, and needs and prompt them to take action and improve.

So, to build intrinsic motivation in your students make your teaching stimulating and interesting because this is going to inspire them to learn more outside school. Develop their mastery orientation to help them focus more on learning and growing. Promote self-motivating strategies to keep them going to attain their learning goals in the face of all challenges. And enhance their autonomy in learning so that they can develop the strategies and tips to learn on their own.

You can help students build intrinsic motivation and become successful lifelong learners.