This article talks about the differences between intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation. It defines intrinsic motivation as "doing an activity for its inherent satisfactions rather than for some separable consequence." It said that one grows knowledge and skills when they act on their inherent interests. It also said that some professionals define intrinsic motivation "in terms of the task being interesting" and others define it "in terms of the satisfactions a person gains from intrinsically motivated task engagement.

 

Extrinsic motivation is defined as "a construct that pertains whenever an activity is done in order to attain some separable outcome." So while people who are intrinsically motivated do a task because they enjoy it, people who are extrinsically motivated do a task because of the outcome. It is believed that as students reach higher grades they become less and less intrinsically motivated and more intrinsically motivated.

 

This article also mentions that there are many forms of extrinsic motivation, and that not all forms are bad. There is external regulation, which is when a behavior is performed to "satisfy an external demand or obtain an externally imposed reward contingency." Then there is Introjection regulation which is a type of internal regulation that still controls people to perform actions with the "feeling of pressure in order to avoid guilt or anxiety or to attain ego-enhancements or pride." Identification extrinsic motivation is when a person identifies with the importance of a behavior and "has accepted its regulation as his or her own." The last form of extrinsic motivation is integrated regulation in which "identified regulations have been fully assimilated to the self." This is when one's values and needs correlate with the necessary behavior. This form of motivation is close to intrinsic motivation but is not that form of motivation because the behavior is still done for its presumed instrumental value and it is done for a specific outcome.

 

The article also says that a person can be exposed to an activity for its external purposes, but the person may experience the activities intrinsic qualities and that person may have an "orientation shift." But a person can already be intrinsically motivated and putting pressure on them or giving them rewards for that behavior may drive them to become extrinsically motivated.

 

The article also talked about the reasons why people would be motivated to do something that has no intrinsic value to them. The primary reason is that they do extrinsic behaviors because those behaviors are valued by a significant other who they want to connect with. This is called relatedness. Another issue is that the person must feel competent that they can do the skills required of a task. If an authority can support competence they will be able to better facilitate internalization (process through with extrinsically motivated behaviors become more self-determined).

 

I really liked this paper because it helped me to see that it is not always bad to teach extrinsic behaviors. When I first learned about intrinsic behavior versus extrinsic, I thought that when I become a teacher I would have to find a way to intrinsically motivate my students in all subjects. I didn't see how this was possible. Now I see that I can extrinsically motivate my students as long as I show them the importance of that behavior. Also, if I try to use more transformative experiences, I am more likely to have my students internalize that behavior.

 

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I believe this article is a very interesting article. The authors do a wonderful job explaining what intrinsic and extrinsic motivation is. They start with the generalized statements about motivation and Self-Determination Theory and move into the main topic of the article. The authors begin by explaining what intrinsic motivation is and how it affects our ability to learn. They discuss what factors facilitate and what factors undermine intrinsic motivation. They also describe some characteristics of autonomy-supportive teachers on page 59.

 

The next section is on extrinsic motivation where, again, they do a great job of defining extrinsic motivation. They give several different types of extrinsic motivation with brief discussion on each one. The authors do point out several differing opinions on the matter and provide their own conclusion.

 

In the conclusion the author's state that it is better to have students be intrinsically motivated than extrinsically motivated. If a student is not interested in the topic you are trying to teach the student will not retain any of the information from the lesson. Internalization is the big key for this model.

 

Overall the article was very useful to me while I was doing my research for this project. The ideas are clearly presented and there is a diagram explaining what the different types of motivation are.