Students and Extrinsic Motivation

Extrinsic motivation refers to motivation that comes from outside an individual. The motivating factors are external, or outside, rewards such as money or grades. These rewards provide satisfaction and pleasure that the task itself may not provide. An extrinsically motivated person will work on a task even when they have little interest in it because of the anticipated satisfaction they will get from some reward. Without grades, students would become less willing to do well in school because they know that there would be no reward even if they do well. Rewards are necessary for most students because they believe that they only need to try hard if they get something out of it. Also without grades, you can tell which students have intrinsic motivation. They are the ones that do the work even though they know that they won't be rewarded. Instead of grades being the reward, giving out candy or maybe a new pencil might also be a good motivational thing.

Arousal is a major aspect of many learning theories and is closely related to other concepts such as anxiety, attention, agitation, stress, and motivation. The arousal level can be thought of as how much capacity you have available to work with. One finding with respect to arousal is the Yerkes-Dodson law. It predicts an inverted U-shaped function between arousal and performance. A certain amount of arousal can be a motivator toward change (with change in this discussion being learning). Too much or too little change will certainly work against the learner. Without grades, many students who use to stress a lot over grades might not have that problem anymore. They would be more relaxed and probably would do better in school.

Learned helplessness means a condition of a human being in which it has learned to behave helplessly, even when the opportunity is restored for it to help itself by avoiding an unpleasant or harmful circumstance to which it has been subjected. Learned helplessness is when a person knows that they will fail so they just give up. Many students might start to get worse in each subject because they depend on feedback to help them improve. Without knowing if they did well or bad, they might just stop studying.

The definition of a self-fulfilling prophecy is that negative beliefs predict negative behavior but, surprisingly, not that positive beliefs predict positive events. This flies in the face of the law of attraction. If the student believes that he is a bad student, then in time he will become a bad student. Just like if a teacher believes that in her class there is a smart student, the teacher will pay more attention to that one student. In time, the student will become better.

Without grades, students, the expectation of good grades is lost, and therefore will cause the student to not work as hard. Also, the student might believe that now without grades, they don't need to worry about grades. They therefore might have a more positive outlook on education and might try to become a better student.