Motivational Theories In Psychology

Submitted By ruggibear
Words: 563
Pages: 3

M R
EDU-213
01/26/14
L D
There is a young man by the name of Drew in Emily Weller’s Biology class who seems to be struggling. Mrs. Weller has stated that she thinks he could have a higher grade in her class then he has now. She has overheard him say that it is too much work and who needs biology anyway. She also heard him say after a quiz “Why bother studying. You get it or you don’t and I don’t get it. So studying is not going to change anything.” This is Mrs. Weller’s first year teaching and is not sure how to help Drew and has asked me for some help in this situation. It is time to discuss some motivational theories. We want to get Drew to the point where he wants to succeed in class; where he becomes intrinsic, task-involved, and have an incremental view of himself.
Mrs. Weller I understand about Drew and the problems he is experiencing in your class; we need to help get him motivated. I think that Drew is displaying himself as a student who is work-avoidant, lacks self-efficacy in Biology; he believes his entity cannot change and he is also looking at possibly becoming acceptant of failure in your class (Ormrod, 2014). His lack of self-efficacy is he does not have personal competence in this particular subject. He avoids doing the work because he feels that he cannot learn this subject well and when he stated that studying did not help is probably because he feels like no matter what he does it is just not in his entity to learn it. Therefore, he will start to accept failing in this class. Drew could be drawing on past attributions of personal experience of not being able to master a subject and wanting to give up; however we need to help change that.
As we know, motivation is the act of getting someone to do something for a reason while also maintaining their behavior. There are different areas of motivation that we could use with Drew and they are intrinsic which is him wanting to do the work for the reward of knowing that he did it, and then