Keeping Track of Motivational Progress
Keeping Track of Motivational Progress
Keeping Track of Motivational Progress
“Prompting progress monitoring improves behavioral performance and the likelihood of attaining one’s goals” (American, 2015). Assessing your scholar’s success is important. This gives credibility to the steps you have taken to provide a wealth of motivation for the scholar and that even your own efforts can be encouraging! One way to do this is by evaluating the progress students are making in answering questions correctly and providing an increasing number of happy faces they receive for a lesson. At the end, you can count the amount of happy faces they receive for a day or week and write the amount down on a chart to look at. You can also keep a total tally of those happy faces. This provides a sense of immediate gratification as well as a demonstration of progress made. This also means that the scholar is tracking the successes and not the failures.
In order for the scholar to be autonomous, self-awareness is a key tool for tracking progress and motivation. When you understand more about yourself, you can improve your motivational progress with intention. This intention allows for better outcomes that can be applied to various contexts. This includes:
- Knowing how long you can spend on an assignment before you should take a break.
- Knowing how long it takes you to complete certain assignments and scheduling accordingly.
- Choosing the environments that cater to better progress
- Accomplishing tasks at a reasonable time of the day that leads to better productivity
Some sources for this series:
American Psychological Association. (2015, October 29). Frequently monitoring progress toward goals increases chance of success: Publicly reporting or recording progress has an even greater effect, study says. ScienceDaily. Retrieved June 7, 2020 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/10/151029101349.htm
Berger, K.S. (2018). The developing person through childhood and adolescence, 11th ed. New York, NY: Worth Publishers.
Cheng, Z & Southcott, J. (2016). Improving students’ intrinsic e motivation in piano learning: Expert teacher voices. Australian Journal of Music Education, v50 n2 p48-57. ISSN-0004-9484
Desautels, L. (2014). Addressing Our Needs: Maslow Comes to Life for Educators and Students. https://www.edutopia.org/blog/addressing-our-needs-maslow-hierarchy-lori-desautels
Ford, V. B., Roby, D. E. Why Do High School Students Lack Motivation in the Classroom? Global Education Journal. Franklin Publishing Company. 101-113.
Overbaugh, R & Schultz, L. (2016). Bloom’s Taxonomy. Old Dominion University. https://www.odu.edu/content/dam/odu/col-dept/teaching-learning/docs/blooms-taxonomy-handout.pdf
Usher, A. & Kober, N. (2012). Student Motivation— An Overlooked Piece of School Reform. Center on Education Policy. Graduate School of Education and Human Development. The George Washington University.
Vibulphol, J. Students’ Motivation and Learning and Teachers’ Motivational Strategies in English Classrooms in Thailand. Canadian Center of Science and Education. Vol. 9, No. 4; 2016. doi: 10.5539/elt.v9n4p64
Vygotsky’s Theory of Child Development (http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/wits/vygotsky-development.pdf) from ethicalpolitics.org
