This article talked about the differences and benefits (or downfalls) of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. This discusses the idea that students who are motivated merely by the want to learn and those who have appreciation for the subject are more likely to do better than those students who are merely focused on their performance alone. This ultimately states the students who are motivated intrinsically are more likely to better in school than those who are motivated extrinsically.

This article also discussed a few downfalls of over-promoting intrinsically motivated students. If a student wants to do the work and wants to learn, they don’t need an excessive amount of praise for it. According to this article, this can actually hinder the student that wanted to do their best without rewards and can cause them to not want to do the work at all; a phenomenon called the over-justification effect. This was a surprise to me because I thought that a student who wanted to do an assignment and did it well wouldn’t mind praise because it would be “icing on the cake”. It actually has the opposite effect. It may be true that most students strive for the highest grades that they can achieve, but the reason some students can not handle an abundance of praise is because they do the work for different reasons. Some do it because they need and want to impress others, or to avoid failure. Some do their best because they want to learn. Over praising these types of kids could have a negative effect on their true potential.

Teachers need to be careful about how they approach praising their students. Teachers need to also be aware as to what students need to transfer from extrinsically motivated to intrinsically motivated learners, yet they need to do this discreetly.

This article discusses the effect that grades have upon students being intrinsically or extrinsically motivated. The first main idea the article discusses is grades affect the appreciation for what the students are learning. Grades are considered rewards, and the article mentions three ways that these rewards can negatively affect a students learning. One of these is overjustification, in which a teacher praises a child or rewards a child for being involved in a hobby or subject. If the student strives for good grades because he/she is looking for approval or looking to avoid failure, the student is not really learning, however, if a student is using the grade for a task-oriented purpose, then it is affective.

Teachers are asked to seek out what interests students in order to influence intrinsic motivation. The article gives several reasons why students value what they learn. Schools are encouraged to create grading systems that encourage intrinsic reasons to learn. There are several suggested readings that would also prove helpful from this article.

This article talks about how intrinsic motivation seems to be more of a positive aspect of learning than extrinsic motivation in a classroom environment. As I read this article I could not help but to think that intrinsic motivation could also be used to overcome other life hurdles as well. For example, battling weight loss, work life, etc. could be handles with more success if one was doing it for the right reasons in intrinsic motivation.

When students were in the classroom and wanted to learn for the sake of learning that proved to help them retain information in a more efficient manner and give them more confidence that they could do the work. When students were being extrinsically they seemed to have tunnel vision, but not in a good way. The thing that they were so engrossed in was not the subject matter but the reward after the work was done. This type of learning is more of a hindrance than a success many times because students are not delving into the subject at hand as well as they could. They are not appreciating what they are learning.

There are some obstacles to intrinsic motivation as well too. If a student is motivated by the work and wants to learn without being promised anything it must be handled with care from the teacher. If a teacher praises a pupil too much for doing something that they like to do in the first place a student nay rebel. When a teacher overjustifies learning it could discourage the student and make him or her wonder if what they are learning needs to be rewarded and can’t just be learned for the sake of learning.

Teachers must relate to their students and make sure that they know why students are learning. If they always need to be rewarded after performing well that is self-destructive. Teachers must keep intrinsic learning students performing in their comfort zone and slowly turn extrinsic students over to learning for inner satisfaction. When the rewards are slowly transferred from material to inner cognitive ones that is when a teacher can rest assured that students will retain information for use later in life.

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In Martin Covington's article, "Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation in Schools: A Reconciliation," he explains that if the teacher gives the students too many rewards for doing well in school, soon the student might expect more of a reward for doing well then previous, causing the student to become less motivated to do the work as time goes on. He also explains that student will eventually learn to not value his/her education if the motivation isn't intrinsic. In other words, the student needs to be motivated to well because of good grades, and not because of a gold star or piece of candy.

It is also stated that students will be more intrinsically motivated if they are doing something they like to do. For example In high school, I really could have cared less about getting good grades in English and math classes, because it seemed to not be important to me, although it really is. But in college now, I want to do better in my classes because I am studying what I want to, not what I have to.

This articles also states what the schools can do to make the students want to learn. First, they state to make subjects more on the lines of the student's interests, and not what they have to learn. The second way is to set a goal that all students should be able to beat, instead of trying to top the rest of the students. The third is having the explain what they got out of the activities by discussing it with others.