Paul Eggen and Don Kauchak (1994) explains:
Arousal is a physical and psychological reaction to the environment, including anxiety and curiosity motivation. Anxiety is arousal to the point of general uneasiness and tension and curiosity motivation is based on the idea that students derive pleasure from activities with an optimal (intermediate) level of surprise, discrepancy, or incongruity—each of which induces arousal (p438, 439).
When a teacher hands out a test, the students are sitting nervously and curious about the content of the test, with elevated blood pressure, fast breath and sweaty hands. This time, the students are alert and wide-awake. They are aroused and their motivation is at a high level. An optimum level of arousal is needed for peak performance (Morris, 1988, p438). So an appropriate arousal assists in enhancing motivation.
B) Motivation and need
A need is the lacking of something necessary or desirable. In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, he divided needs into two categories. The bottoms four are called deficiency needs, and the top three are called growth needs. Until the lower needs are met, people are likely to move to higher ones. His work has important implications for education. In classroom, students who are threatened by potential embarrassment are less motivated to learn, until they study in secure and relaxed environment, they will move to the need for competence which related to competence motivation that is an innate need in human beings that energizes people to master tasks and skills. The need for achievement drives students to fulfill their goals. Students with a high need for achievement tend to be motivated by challenging assignments, high grading standards, explicit feedback, and the opportunity to try again. In contrast, students with a need to avoid failure avoid challenging tasks and experience anxiety in testing situation. Being aware of these differences can help teachers respond different students with different needs and as a result, teach all students more effectively.
C) Motivation and beliefs
A third personal factor that affects people’s motivation is their beliefs. An optimistic belief about one’s ability in English learning can help students increase their motivation. In incremental view of the beliefs about ability, human can hold the beliefs that ability can be improved with effort. Although students incline to be influenced by teachers’ evaluation of their ability in participating activities, they have an optimistic view of their ability to a certain extend which cause their self-confident originally. They also react strongly to failure and self-doubt. A linking theory is attribution theory, which is an attempt to systematically describe students’ explanations for their successes and failures in classroom situations (Weiner, 1990, p444). So teachers can help students attribute their successes o ability and effort while failure bad luck and task difficulty and provide them more opportunities to experience success for the sake of setting an optimal belief of the learning ability as well as enhancing learning motivation.
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