Phyllis: Clarifying And Expanding Goal Theory By Phyllis C. Blumenfeld

What Motivates a Student? Motivation is the entire constellation of factors, some inside the organism and some outside, that cause an individual to behave in a particular way at a particular. A constant struggle for teachers and college professors is to get their students motivated to learn and for them to receive a high overall average letter grade in the class. In a journal written by Phyllis C. Blumenfeld called “Classroom Learning and Motivation: Clarifying and Expanding Goal Theory” explains how to get students motivated and she creates somewhat of a how to guide for those teachers that want to get their students to engage in the subject. She uses three main elements which are task, evaluation, and authority to get the students to engage and take interest in that lesson or subject. She uses a few tasks which are variety, challenge, and meaningfulness task to affect the student’s sensitivity on goal orientation. Variety can be done in many ways such as games, novelty, computers, and contests. Although …show more content…
Certain activities and task that a student is given is evaluated as either meaningful or a want. If the task is determined as either meaningless or not something that a student wants to complete their motivation to do that task decreases. That is what this journal article helps explain to the audience and contribute to science. Teachers sometimes make up assignments that restrict a student that does not fit their abilities causing their motivation to decrease along with quality of the work, but if the teacher allows to student to choose how they want to complete the task the motivation and quality will increase. Understanding how a student thinks and is motivated is how this article contributes to science and to the audience to better understand how to grasp a student’s attention and motivate them to complete the task at