Motivation: The Key to Educational Success
by This essay seeks to question the way the staff in public schools are trained to engage students in the learning process. The overabundance and erroneous opinion that schools and the students they care for can be improved by grading them based on on a rating system that is often the root cause of pressure, poor behavior, disengaging from school, and the outrageously high drop out rate in the U.S. Suggestions are made for changes that may re-engage students in their education while preventing the drop out rate from rising.
The emphasis on standardized testing in many of our nation’s schools is one that has severely reduced the value of education. The erroneous belief that the results of standardized tests provide an accurate measure of a student’s abilities is one that undermines the intrinsic motivation that is necessary for student engagement in the learning process. By the time students reach middle school, students are too old to be forced into academic engagement by authority figures, and too young to appreciate the value of learning for the simple, yet pervasive, benefits that come with the acquisition of knowledge.
Engaging, and re-engaging a student in the learning process is no easy task. Facilitating the intrinsic motivation required to acquire and retain knowledge will require time, patience, and a restructuring of our education system. While there has been a movement from techniques that involve punishing students who are resistant to standard education practices to the more effective approach of character and skill development, positive intervention strategies that address the issue of student motivation are rarely introduced to teachers and administrators in their pre-practice training. If the people responsible for encouraging students to learn focused more on developing intrinsic motivation in their students, there is a better chance that students will perform better on standardized tests. Students who are self motivated learn better than those who struggle through the education process, or simply drop out, because they feel pressured or coerced into achieving high scores. Extensive research in the field of motivation has suggested that extrinsic motivational factors, such as test results are ineffective in facilitating and maintaining student motivation.
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