Theories of Motivation: A Teacher Can Use to Motivate Students

1. Need Disposition Theory:

According to this theory, an organism behaves in order to reduce its needs. Any person work to complete his/her needs. People are motivated to take action and invest energy in pursuit of three motives:

(I) Achievement

(II) Affiliation

(III) Influence.

As for example everyone works to achieve some goals. A student learns sentence pattern of English to achieve.

The performance of expressing his/her views in English:

To motivate our students we, as a teacher, should understand the need of the students and then try to organise our teaching learning process in such a manner so that they could achieve their needs after taking part in it.

2. Maslow’s theory of motivation:

According to this theory every person works to fulfill his/her needs. He maintains that a person will remain at a given need level until those needs are satisfied, and then move on to the next. According to this theory there is a sequence or order in the basic needs. People’s motivation derives directly from their needs. When person fulfills his/her present needs then he/she moves to the next. In other words these basic needs or their sequence help very much to motivate our students.

Maslow postulated seven basic needs in a hierarchical order.

I. Aesthetic need: Need to experience and understand beauty for its own sake. First four needs are ‘deficiency needs’ and the last three needs are ‘being’ needs. We can motivate to gratify the being needs when deficiency needs are met. A teacher should understand all these seven needs are their sequence so that he/she could facilitate need fulfillment and could motivate students to wants it.

II. Need to know-Curiosity, a need to learn about the world.

III. Need for self actualization-Self fulfillments and achievement of personal goals and ambitions, starving for full use and exploitations of talents, capacities and potentialities to achieve goals.

IV. Need for self esteem-Need for self respect, a feeling of adequacy, competence, mastery.

IV. Need for love and belongingness-Need for affection, in family or peer, group affiliation and personal acceptance.

V. Need for safety-Avoidance of danger and anxiety desire for security, Protection and family stability.

VI. Physiological needs-Need for food, drink, sleeps etc.

3. Theory of achievement motivation:

This theory is based on the work of Hoppe (1930) sears (1940), McClelland (1958, 1961) and Atkinsou (1958, 66)

A. Hoppe (1930). He described that people raised their level of aspiration after success and lowered them after failure. According to this theory we should have goals at realistic level, achievable and satisfying. If we have high goals then they will not be fulfilled and so students will lower their level of aspiration due to failure in achievements of goals.

We should not have goals at very low level. If a student is given a test paper framed at very low level then after giving answer of this paper he/she cannot raise his aspiration. So we should try to set goals at realistic level so that they could achieve them and get motivation for next stage.

B. McClelland (1961, 1971) stated that the need for achievement directly influences academic performance. People with strong needs for achievements use their own skills to improve themselves.

For example the students, who have strong needs, try to acquire these needs by their great efforts and skills, According to McClelland, need for achievement is related to parents’ attitudes. Parents who are high achievers themselves, demand independence and help developing self confidence.

4. Attribution Theory:

According to theory we understand how students explain their success and failure and the implications, those explanations have for achievement-oriented behaviour in the future. Students often use one of the seven different forms of explanation for their success or failure.

As for example if a student has personal short coming, he explains that he had been bad at that particular subject. Student explains, unreasonable teacher behaviour, as the form that the teacher wanted to fail him.

At the end we can say that every teacher should understand various theories of motivation so that he/she could motivate students with the help of these theories. A teacher should always try to motivate students for taking part i teaching learning process effectively and aim fully.