Reading material for Lesson 2.4 Motivation in Teaching and Learning Process

5. Motivational function of the trainer / instructor

From the available theory and data of the educational psychology, the teacher should perform four functions to motivate the learners, which are as follows:

 Arousal function

 It is to arouse and maintain learner’s interest. It involves the initial responsibility of winning the learner’s attention (readiness to receive the lesson) and the continuing responsibility of regulating the level of arousal to avoid both sleep and emotional eruption. To meet this, the trainer should make the lesson interesting to the learners by bringing them within the learner’s intellectual range and helping them to understand that it is worth and valuable. Changing the position, tone of voice, mood of the trainer, teaching valuable from one technique to another etc, all leads to increased motivation of learner.

 

Expectance function

It is to maintain or modify the learner’s expectation of success or failure in reaching the instructional objectives. It requires the trainer to describe concretely the learners what they will be able to do after the lesson.

 

Incentive function

 It is to encourage learner in his further effort in the pursuit of instructional objectives. Feedback of test results, spoken or written praise or blame, grading, competition and co-operation are some of the established methods as successful incentives for learners which increase learner’s vigour in learning. However, care must be taken that these incentives do not come as discouragement to other groups of learners.

 

Disciplinary function

 It is to control the deviant behaviour of the learners through the use of reward and punishment. A punishment procedure which involves both the suppression of undesired response (or behaviour) and the provision of an alternative reward for desired response (or behaviour) may be a most effective procedure. This artful combination of punishment and reward as a disciplinary technique is called “restitution”. This technique should be adopted by the trainer in a non-threatening manner.