Title: Strategies for Helping Students Motivate Themselves | Edutopia
Headings: Strategies for Helping Students Motivate Themselves
Strategies for Helping Students Motivate Themselves
By Larry Ferlazzo
Autonomy
Competence
Relatedness
Relevance

Content: Don’t give up on students: Be positive (as much as humanly possible) and encourage a growth mindset. Relevance
Have students write about how they see what they are learning as relevant to their lives. Researchers had students write one paragraph after a lesson sharing how they thought what they had learned would be useful to their lives. Writing one to eight of these during a semester led to positive learning gains, especially for those students who had previously been “low performers.” It is not uncommon for teachers to explicitly make those kinds of real-life connections. However, research has also found that this kind of teacher-centered approach can actually be demotivating to some students with low skills. A student who is having a very difficult time understanding math or does just not find it interesting, for example, can feel threatened by hearing regularly from a teacher how important math is to his or her future. Instead of becoming more engaged in class, he or she may experience more negative feelings. These researchers write that a “more effective approach would be to encourage students to generate their own connections and discover for themselves the relevance of course material to their lives.