Personal Narrative: My Personal Field Experience

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Pages: 9

Introduction The past four months I have been working with children at a tutoring center. I have come to know and love these children over these past four months and during this paper I am going to talk about that experience and how my studies can relate to my time spent there. I will go over the field site and give background information about it as well as talk about connections to educational psychology during my field experience. I will go over topics that relate to my personal field experience and then reflect on the implications of my studies and the program. I will discuss motivation and success, learning styles, and pedagogy and praxis and how they relate to my field experience. These children have left an impact on my life and I plan …show more content…
On the hard days I would use extrinsic incentives to get through the day. The children liked working for checks because after getting so many checks the sisters would give them prizes to take home such as stuffed animals. I also said that after so many weeks of getting their checkmarks that I would bring little gifts to them as well and this motivated them to do their work. I also saw these children have intrinsic incentives because they told me about dreams they have and what aspirations they have for their lives and I believe that this also motivated to do well. To help these students succeed we made goals at the beginning of the semester of what they wanted at the end. These children were in kindergarten and so I did have to help them come up with some realistic goals but once we did I believe that it helped them want to work towards accomplishing these goals. The expectancy theory is “A theory of motivation based on the belief that people’s efforts to achieve depend on their expectation of reward.” The expectancy-valence model is “A theory that relates the probability and the incentive value of success to motivation.” Slavin states that “the most important implication of expectancy theory is the commonsense proposition that tasks for students should be neither too easy nor too difficult. If some students believe that they are likely to get an A no matter what they do, then their motivation will not be at a maximum. Similarly, if some students feel certain to fail no matter what they do, their motivation will be minimal.” (Slavin. Ch. 10 pg 294) “Ability beliefs are defined as the individual’s perception of his or her current competence at a given activity.” (Eccles) If my children did not feel very confident at a certain topic I would make them work harder and build them up for everything pertaining to that topic so that their motivation increase. I made my students work for their checkmarks