Connecting content and motivation: Education's missing link

Abstract

The proposition seems simple enough. Motivate students and learning curves will rise. We've always known that; teacher educators have always covered (literally, that may be the problem) the issue in education courses, and seemingly, instructional practice has always unfolded with the assumption that somehow teachers would automatically connect motivation with content. This essential interrelatedness, unfortunately, eludes much of the instructional emphasis in classrooms, and therefore many optimal learning opportunities for those who would be beneficiaries are denied. The profession has only in recent educational history recognized relationships with and significance of intrinsic motivation-something that is worth doing for its own sake-as it relates to learning (Csikszenlmihalyi, 1990). As for extrinsic motivationobservable rewards such as letter grades, money, material success, and so forth-(Barenblatt & Lloyd, 1984), assumption about its import has more history, more professional acceptance, is more easily detected, and has been more frequently associated with routine task-completion (i.e., the three R's; rote, regurgitation, and reward!). However, for purposes here, motivation type is not the primary focus or cogent issue; connecting learner motivation, in general, with curricular content is. The particular working definition of curriculum for this disquisition relies on the essential educational relationships and subsequent ramifications associated with the following six…