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Motivating and Engaging Students
Motivating StudentsSome students seem naturally enthusiastic about learning, but many need-or expect-their instructors to inspire, challenge, and stimulate them: "Effective learning in the classroom depends on the teacher's ability ... to maintain the interest that brought students to the course in the first place" (Ericksen, 1978, p. 3). Whatever level of motivation your students bring to the classroom will be transformed, for better or worse, by what happens in that classroom (Barbara Gross Davis-University of California-Berkley).
Strategies for Engaging Students
Several brief suggestions for making students more active and engaged participants in their own education, including connecting class topics with students' lives, offering students choices in their learning, as well as using writing and various technologies (Val Farmer-Dougan & Kathleen McKinney, Illinois State University)
Encouraging Students' Intrinsic Motivation
One that is discussed repeatedly is the concern that students focus too much on grades and not enough on learning. In part, the issue here is one of extrinsic vs. intrinsic motivation (Kathleen McKinney, Illinois State University).
Motivating Students (Teaching Effectiveness Program - University of Oregon)
Motivating Students - 8 Simple Rules
Principles of Accounting has the reputation of being a "hard and boring" course. It is difficult to motivate students to invest the time and effort necessary to succeed in the course. To meet this challenge, we have assembled a list of eight simple rules for keeping students focused and motivated. These rules are not original, and they aren't just for those of us who teach accounting classes. Indeed, most of these time-honored suggestions apply to any course students find hard and boring, and we think that makes them broadly applicable (Lana Becker and Kent N. Schneider, East Tennessee State University).
Motivating the Unmotivated
When I think about what students want, I know that classes that deliver the same old message of "sit down, shut up, and listen so that you can memorize facts to dump onto a test sheet" probably are not going to motivate them (Ronald W. Luce, Communications Instructor, Hocking Technical College, Nelsonville, OH).
