Optimal challenge, intrinsic motivation, and failure-avoidant behavior: how to put joy and success back in learning

Abstract

Past failures debilitates intrinsic motivation of failure-avoidant individual for future tasks. Presenting 9 impossible Tangrams in a classroom setting, failure-avoidant students were asked to solve as many puzzles as they could in 20 minutes. Following their failure, students were assigned to either a relevant-choice, irrelevant-choice, perceived-choice, or no-choice condition. Students had unlimited time to solve as many of 27 solvable Tangrams as they liked from three difficulty levels. Performance, persistence, and self-report of enjoyment measured intrinsic motivation. No significant differences emerged among the irrelevant-choice, perceived-choice, and no-choice group. Students who had the relevant choice to select their optimal challenge performed better, persisted longer, and enjoyed the task more than did students who had no relevant-choice. When required to solve a final Tangram, the relevant choice group still performed and persisted significantly better than the groups without relevant choice.