institutionalized failing?

In institutionalized education, tests and grades are often used to motivate students to learn, but in what way are they motivating us? More importantly, how will this affect our learning?

Do you remember that love of learning you once had as a child? Reading about space, animals, and dinosaurs just for the sake of learning, for that joy and excitement of trying to fill your brain with as much knowledge as possible. This was a time of engaging in a behaviour for the internal rewards that behaviour gave you—this is intrinsic motivation. It was this intrinsic motivation to learn coupled with my love of animals that resulted in little 6 year old me learning over 100 dog breeds and their characteristics. I have found that within the years of school this intrinsic desire to learn has greatly diminished, and has been replaced with a great desire for external validation through grades (extrinsic motivation). It feels great to see a good grade on paper, however it feels not so great 4 months later when you look back and realize you forget most of what you learnt. Sometimes I feel like my psych degree has taught me not how to master knowledge but rather how to become a master test taker.

Professors Edward L. Deci author of “Why We Do What We Do, Understanding Self Motivation” along with Professor Richard Ryan and former student Carl Benware, explored the effect of tests on students intrinsic motivation to learn. In their experiment they had two groups of university students spend 3 hours learning neurophysiology; half of the students were told they would teach the material to other students and the other half where told they would be tested on it. They expected that with grades acting as an extrinsic control the students in the test condition would feel less intrinsically motivated to do the task then those in the teaching condition (which would be seen as an exciting challenge)—and that’s exactly what they found. The students who where learning the material in order to be tested where less intrinsically motivated(Deci,Flaste 47). Ryan, and Wendy Grolnick did a similar follow up study with elementary school children to see how test vs. none test conditions effected learning. They found that children who expected to be tested used more route memorization compared to those in the none testing condition who displayed higher conceptual learning. Personally, I found that the most interesting and relevant insight from this study was what the researchers discovered a week later: when the students were asked questions about what they had learned a week earlier, those who learned to be tested remembered much less. Ryan and Grolnick used the name “core dump” to refer to this process: individuals memorize the material for the test, and the second the assessment is over the information clears from ones brain(Deci, Flaste 48–49).

I loved learning about these studies because they provided experimental evidence for phenomena I have been feeling and experiencing. However, in a time of my life that is filled with the extrinsic control by tests, and fuelled by the competitive nature of McGill how can I escape it? How can I increase this motivation to learn? Perhaps these findings on intrinsic motivation could lead to a more productive and learning centered assessment method.

Works cited

Deci, Edward L., and Richard Flaste. Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-motivation. New York: Penguins, 1996. Print.

student id: 260519089