12-01-2005, 10:02 AM
The following question was sent to the forums:
In education we know that learning results are better if the students are motivated to learn and if they are willing to learn and to become skilled. In my educational design work we search for possibilities to stimulate this Ãntrinsic motivation for development. So far we have good results with enterprising education, that means education organized as small challenging enterprises. Who can explain me the relation with brain activity?!
Our answer:
We have just begun in the OECD Learning Sciences and Brain research project to explore the issue of motivation and learning, so I am excited to start a thread on this topic. You should take a look at our most recent report on the Emotions, Education and Learning Seminar which has just been put up on the main website: http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/41/30/34098220.pdf
see especially pages 7-12 which deal with motivation. I am pasting an excerpt from page 9 of this report:
What is motivation?
Roughly, motivation can be defined as whatever causes to act. As such, motivation reflects states in which the organism is prepared to act physically and mentally in a focussed manner, that is, in states characterised by raised levels of arousal. Accordingly, motivation is intimately related to emotions as emotions constitute the brain's way of evaluating whether things should be acted upon; approached if pleasant or avoided if unpleasant. Thus, the emotional system (associated with the amygdala and the orbitofrontal cortex) is tapping directly into motivation by affecting our level of arousal (which again is controlled by structures in the brain stem). It is worthwhile to distinguish between external and internal (intrinsic) motivation. Both are dependant on emotions, but whereas external motivation is achieved by affecting the behaviour of the organism from the outside (through punishment and reward) intrinsic motivation reflects the organism's wishes to fulfill internal needs and desires (e.g., hunger, thirst, sex). A lot of the important things neuroscience has to say about motivation in the context of learning thus concerns emotions; and often the part that relates external motivation through punishment and reward. Nevertheless, there is also fairly good neuroscientific evidence suggesting that curiosity can be considered as an intrinsic motivational drive. Accordingly, novelty in the learning environment is probably an important element in motivation as novelty awakes curiosity. Interestingly, detection of novelty is associated with the hippocampus which, as we know, is an important structure in memory encoding and memory consolidation.
Humans like other animals have “motivational drives†which are linked to our emotions, and it has been proposed that one of these drives is curiosity. There are also strong indications that motivation and emotion affect the memory system. To a large extent, all animals including human
beings are driven by unconscious desires that are not fully understood by them, except when they go wrong (and you end up with people with addictions to alcohol, gambling, drugs, etc.), yet it is these very same mechanisms driving most of our behaviour. The impetus for this may be external stimuli such as rewards and punishers, but at the same time there are also internal drives, which drive those truly pleasurable things that you do just for the pleasure of it. Most people will have experienced this from something they did actively (usually using motor
skills), like learning to ride a bicycle for the first time, but without external reward. The mechanisms of these internal drives are not well understood, and are presently difficult to study with neuroimaging techniques.
We would love to receive more questions and views on motivation for learning from teachers.
In education we know that learning results are better if the students are motivated to learn and if they are willing to learn and to become skilled. In my educational design work we search for possibilities to stimulate this Ãntrinsic motivation for development. So far we have good results with enterprising education, that means education organized as small challenging enterprises. Who can explain me the relation with brain activity?!
Our answer:
We have just begun in the OECD Learning Sciences and Brain research project to explore the issue of motivation and learning, so I am excited to start a thread on this topic. You should take a look at our most recent report on the Emotions, Education and Learning Seminar which has just been put up on the main website: http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/41/30/34098220.pdf
see especially pages 7-12 which deal with motivation. I am pasting an excerpt from page 9 of this report:
What is motivation?
Roughly, motivation can be defined as whatever causes to act. As such, motivation reflects states in which the organism is prepared to act physically and mentally in a focussed manner, that is, in states characterised by raised levels of arousal. Accordingly, motivation is intimately related to emotions as emotions constitute the brain's way of evaluating whether things should be acted upon; approached if pleasant or avoided if unpleasant. Thus, the emotional system (associated with the amygdala and the orbitofrontal cortex) is tapping directly into motivation by affecting our level of arousal (which again is controlled by structures in the brain stem). It is worthwhile to distinguish between external and internal (intrinsic) motivation. Both are dependant on emotions, but whereas external motivation is achieved by affecting the behaviour of the organism from the outside (through punishment and reward) intrinsic motivation reflects the organism's wishes to fulfill internal needs and desires (e.g., hunger, thirst, sex). A lot of the important things neuroscience has to say about motivation in the context of learning thus concerns emotions; and often the part that relates external motivation through punishment and reward. Nevertheless, there is also fairly good neuroscientific evidence suggesting that curiosity can be considered as an intrinsic motivational drive. Accordingly, novelty in the learning environment is probably an important element in motivation as novelty awakes curiosity. Interestingly, detection of novelty is associated with the hippocampus which, as we know, is an important structure in memory encoding and memory consolidation.
Humans like other animals have “motivational drives†which are linked to our emotions, and it has been proposed that one of these drives is curiosity. There are also strong indications that motivation and emotion affect the memory system. To a large extent, all animals including human
beings are driven by unconscious desires that are not fully understood by them, except when they go wrong (and you end up with people with addictions to alcohol, gambling, drugs, etc.), yet it is these very same mechanisms driving most of our behaviour. The impetus for this may be external stimuli such as rewards and punishers, but at the same time there are also internal drives, which drive those truly pleasurable things that you do just for the pleasure of it. Most people will have experienced this from something they did actively (usually using motor
skills), like learning to ride a bicycle for the first time, but without external reward. The mechanisms of these internal drives are not well understood, and are presently difficult to study with neuroimaging techniques.
We would love to receive more questions and views on motivation for learning from teachers.
