Motivating Adolescents
QUICK LOOK AT THE CHAPTER AHEAD
Motivation enables individuals to organize, direct, and sustain their own effortful behavior.
Cognitive theories posit that individuals are motivated by excitement of discovery.
Attribution theories identify four reasons to which individuals attribute their performance: ability, effort, task difficulty, and luck.
Behavior theories focus on external reinforcement as the source of individuals’ motivation.
Intrinsic motivation theories posit that motivation arises from an internal need for competence and autonomy.
Social cognitive theories emphasize the importance of role models and self-efficacy for motivation.
TERMS
Attribution theory
Motivation
Social learning theory
People who set their sights on realistic goals and believe they have the ability to reach them have taken a major step on the path to success. This is as true for adolescents as for members of any other age group. Determination, positive attitude, and feelings of competence contribute powerfully to academic achievement, good relations with others, and positive interactions with parents, teachers, and other adults. One of the most significant psychological contributors to successful passage through adolescence is motivation.
THE MEANING OF MOTIVATIONWhen people ask about motivation, their intent is usually to discover what causes people to act in a particular way, what their inner feelings about their situation are, and what they want—what their goal is. It is difficult to specify just what motivation is, but a good, working definition is as follows: Motivation arouses, sustains, directs, and integrates behavior.
Another way of coming to grips with the meaning of motivation is to examine several motivational theories (Table 62-1). Review Chapter 6 for more on this topic.
COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY AND MOTIVATIONCognitive theorists believe that internal processes, such as thinking, control human behavior. Jerome Bruner (1966), one of the leading cognitive theorists of the twentieth century, believed that there is an ideal level of arousal between apathy and wild excitement.
Bruner turned to the notion of discovery as a means of furthering intrinsic motivation. Arguing that discovery leads to new insights, Bruner believed that people learn to manipulate their environment more actively and achieve considerable gratification from personally coping with problems.
ATTRIBUTION THEORY AND MOTIVATIONAll people attribute their behavior to a specific cause, and these attributions then serve as a guide to their expectations for future success or failure. Attribution theory rests on three basic assumptions (Weiner, 1980):
Table 62-1 Motivation: Theories and Themes | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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