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.