Analysis Of Supporting Students Motivation, Engagement, And Learning

Keeping students motivated and engaged is among the hardest things we will do in our classroom. Teachers are always trying to find what works and what does not. In order to do this we need to know our students, and give them a reason to be involved. It seems that every year, and with possibly every lesson the big question is ‘”How can I keep my students motivated and actively engaged?” We have discovered that every class and every student is different, and we need to find what works for all students. It is possible to keep students motivated, if we do what works for them.
The articles I read were about a study titled, Supporting Students’ Motivation, Engagement, and Learning During an Uninteresting Activity. In this study, students were

64). The two theoretical models of motivation used in this study were: The Interest Regulation Model, and The Identified Regulation Model.
“Identified regulation is extrinsic because the activity is performed primarily because of its usefulness or instrumentality (work in order to develop a skill) rather than because it is interesting” while the “The interest regulation model explains that when people find a learning activity to be boring but inevitable, they generally attempt to regulate their interest by self-generating strategies designed to raise their immediate or situational interest to a level that is high enough to get through the otherwise uninteresting endeavor” (Jang, 2008, p.

802). After the preexperimental questionnaire was completed the “participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups (control condition, experimental condition) and were tested in small groups, with an average of 6 individuals per group” (Jang, 2008, p. 802). The participants in the study were seated so their privacy was maintained, and they were not allowed interaction with other participants until the study was complete. During the study Two trained raters sat in the room with small groups of the students and unobtrusively observed and scored the participants for on-task attention, effort, and persistence after 10 and 20 minutes of the activity” Johnson, 2009, p.