A Summary
A Summary
of “Quality of learning with an active versus passive motivation set”
In
the article “Quality of learning with an active versus passive motivation set,”
the author argues that students with an active orientation to learn will be
more intrinsically motivated to have higher conceptual learning scores by
actively engaged with the environment. Students with the active orientation
expect to teach the learning material so that they think critically and
interact with the course material closely. On the contrary, students with the
passive orientation expect the knowledge of the learning material to be tested so that they simply need to take
notes and memorize those notes. These two different orientations lead to
different attitudes and methods of learning, which again leads to different
results of learning.
The
active orientation leads to the desire of teaching, which has a positive effect
on the learning effect. This article lists Cloward’s research, Allen and
Feldman’s study, and Goldschmid’s study
to prove that “tutoring can enhance learning, motivation, perceived competence,
and self-esteem of the tutors” (Benware 756). In these studies, when tutors
teach others, they have acquired more improvements and motivations than others.
The tutoring exposes persons to the learning material and makes persons have a sense of psychological achievement.
Learning with a passive orientation simply needs to accept the learning
material without considering why. Students with the passive orientation simply
absorb the facts without their interpretations. However, learning with the
active orientation or the expectation of teaching requires a more comprehensive
understanding of the learning material and the proper way to deliver the
knowledge to others. Students with the active orientation need to think
critically why and learn how to learn in order
to deliver the knowledge in the easiest
way. According to the motivational theory of Deci and Ryan, “ learning in order to teach facilitates greater intrinsic
motivation than learning in order to be tested, which results in greater learning and more positive self-related affects and
cognitions” (Benware 756).
Besides,
the active orientation of learning facilitates intrinsic motivation and active
learning. This motivation has a meaningful impact on one’s environment and
increases one’s self-determination. Students with the active orientation and
the expectation of teaching use different cognitive structures to achieve
greater content-specific and process learning. Bargh and Schul designed an
experiment in 1980 to prove this conclusion. They chose two groups of students
to test the learning result, one group with an active orientation while the
other with a passive orientation. These two groups studied the same material
for 5 minutes and got tested with short answers.
The result showed that subjects who learned with the expectation of teaching
had a better performance than those who were simply instructed to learn (Benware
758). Students with an active orientation tend to have a higher requirement of
the learning result so that they are more self-determined to achieve a better
result than those with a passive orientation. They actively interpret the
learning material by their critical thoughts, instead of passively receiving
facts without linking them to other information.