Self Help Learning, Actions, Results

How do confidence and motivation affect student learning?

Public Comments

1. If you have no confidence then you don't try hard and if your not motivated then you really don't care
2. Confidence is the ability to believe that you can...with my students I used to start with small easy tasks and work up gradually to build up that "I can do it" attitude. Motivation is the "I want that" part...for this purpose I always tried to find out the goals, the dreams and the "whys" of these. Then I used the confidence building to motivate students to go and reach for what they wanted. In addition to this, one has to connect confidence, motivation to real life applications and the student has to see the relevance of education to real life. If the connection is not made then education becomes a "useless" (in many students' words) abstract and it's hard to keep them confident and motivated.
3. student learning is based on attention+interest created +desire sought+action planned - this is the key to any motivational learning
4. you cannot control what students do, you can only control what YOU do. This is where motivation comes in. The student may not be interested in the subject you are teaching, but if they are interested in you as a person and you make it interesting and meaningful, they will be motivated. They have to know that you care before they will care. Confidence is a little different. This comes from creating a learning environment where it is safe to make mistakes and where success is celebrated. It feels good to do something right and they want do feel that over and over again. (this helps them motivate themselves, too.)