Becoming an Effective Teacher Requires an Understanding of Student Attitudes, Beliefs and Motivations

Our students have a robust, innate propensity and desire to learn and to actively assimilate knowledge. They are naturally curious, with powerful intrinsic motives to understand their world. Accordingly, we, as teachers, must capitalize on this inherently active and curious nature so that learning becomes a joy and an activity to be sought out. Achieving this goal requires an understanding of student attitudes, beliefs, characteristics and motivations. This requires a profound motivation and focus on understanding the learner. Sadly, faculty often neglects to obtain knowledge of the learner and his/her motivations and do not acknowledge the importance of this vastly underutilized approach to improving classroom instruction. However, there are many attitudes, beliefs and characteristics that students bring to the classroom, and we must deal with all of these human factors if we want our students to learn. To achieve this goal, we administered The Intrinsic Motivation Inventory (IMI), a multidimensional measurement device, to assess our students’ intrinsic motivation for our undergraduate exercise physiology class. Furthermore, we assessed the relationship between factors influencing motivation with class attendance and performance. The desire for autonomy, competence and relatedness to the instructor were most strongly correlated with class attendance and performance. These results have powerful implications for both classroom practice and educational reform policies.