Review of “Motivation in Education”
By: Dale H. Schunk, Paul R. Pintrich, and Judith L. Meece
These authors have written an educational book that is directed at students who are studying to be teachers. This textbook is about the different theories of motivation that various scholars and scientists have researched and proven to work in motivating students and teachers alike.
The first chapter gives an in-depth view of the different theories of what motivation means to the authors and to the researchers/scientists who studied this subject. This chapter also gives a brief history of the different motivational theories that are currently being used in classrooms and that are being taught to future teachers. This chapter is very important because it prepares you for the discussions that make up the rest of the book.
The next three chapters discuss three important theories of motivation: “Expectancy-Value Theory”, “Attribution Theory”, and “Social Cognitive Theory”. Each of these theories alone is useful in classrooms but all three greatly help teachers in understanding what will and won’t motivate their students and why some students are motivated in certain areas and others are not. I noticed that cultural research was only lightly touched on in these theories. Cultural, ethnicity and traditional values play a big part in how one is motivated and greatly influences how a person learns and is motivated to learn.
These three chapters are very informative for a perspective teacher who is studying in college but it’s not written for the general public. The authors use a lot of technical terms that had me doing some research online in order to fully understand what was being said. On the other hand, I like the “real-life” examples that are given at the beginning of each chapter. This helps to put the discussion into perspective and also helps to visualize these theories.
In the next few chapters, the authors write about the variables and influences that affect...