Woogul Lee

Teachers' Estimates of Their Students' Motivation and Engagement: Being in Synch with Students.

Being aware of, monitoring and responding constructively to students’ signals of motivation and to students’ signals of engagement represent two important teaching skills. We hypothesised, however, that teachers would better estimate their students’ engagement than they would estimate their students’ motivation. To test this hypothesis, Korean high-school teachers rated three aspects of motivation and four aspects of engagement for each student in their class, while students completed questionnaires to provide referent self-reports of these same aspects of their motivation and engagement. Multi-level analyses showed that, after statistically controlling for the potentially confounding information of student achievement, teachers’ engagement estimates corresponded significantly to their students’ self-reports while their motivation estimate did not. These findings validate teachers’ skill in inferring their students’ classroom engagement and lead to the recommendation that teachers monitor classroom engagement to be in synch with their students during instruction.

Effects of Achievement Goals on Challenge Seeking and Feedback Processing: Behavioral and fMRI Evidence

We conducted behavioral and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) research to investigate the effects of two types of achievement goals—mastery goals and performance-approach goals— on challenge seeking and feedback processing. The results of the behavioral experiment indicated that mastery goals were associated with a tendency to seek challenge, both before and after experiencing difficulty during task performance, whereas performance-approach goals were related to a tendency to avoid challenge after encountering difficulty during task performance. The fMRI experiment uncovered a significant decrease in ventral striatal activity when participants received negative feedback for any task type and both forms of achievement goals. During the processing of negative feedback for the rule-finding task, performance-approach-oriented participants showed a substantial reduction in activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and the frontopolar cortex, whereas mastery-oriented participants showed little change. These results suggest that performance-approach-oriented participants are less likely to either recruit control processes in response to negative feedback or focus on task-relevant information provided alongside the negative feedback. In contrast, mastery-oriented participants are more likely to modulate aversive valuations to negative feedback and focus on the constructive elements of feedback in order to attain their task goals. We conclude that performance-approach goals lead to a reluctant stance towards difficulty, while mastery goals encourage a proactive stance.

Interest as Emotion, as Affect, and as Schema

The present chapter answers three questions: What is interest? Why is it important? How can teachers promote it in the classroom? To answer these questions, we find it necessary to conceptualize interest in three different ways— first as a basic emotion, second as an affect, and third as an emotion schema. As a basic emotion, interest may be understood as a coordinated feeling-purposive-expressive-bodily reaction to an opportunity to acquire new information and to learn. As a type of affect, interest may be understood as an alert, positive feeling that reflects students’ underlying motivational status during instruction. As an emotion schema, interest may be understood as a complex knowledge structure that integrates interest phenomenology with cognitions such as appraisal, value, and topical knowledge. Interest is important to researchers and educators alike for two primary reasons. First, interest motivates engagement, and it motivates the type of highquality engagement that leads to positive educational outcomes such as learning. Second, interest replenishes students’ motivational and cognitive resources to the extent that interest-engaged students experience heightened vitality, rather than exhaustion, during learning activities. As to how teachers can promote students’ interest in the classroom, this chapter focuses on promoting interest as a basic emotion by identifying instructional strategies designed to offer students the core antecedent to interest (i.e., opportunities to acquire new information and to learn) and on promoting interest as affect by identifying instructional strategies conducive to a constructive motivational status (e.g., involving students’ psychological needs).