Optimal challenge, intrinsic motivation, and failure-avoidant behavior: how to put joy and success back in learning
West, Sylvia Wandell-Conner
West, Sylvia Wandell-Conner
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Date
1993
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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.
Contents
Subject
Subject(s)
Failure (Psychology)
Intrinsic motivation
Learning, Psychology of
Intrinsic motivation
Learning, Psychology of
Research Projects
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Genre
Dissertation
Description
Format
vi, 72 leaves : illustrations
Department
Psychology