Intrinsic motivation and the process of learning: Beneficial effects of contextualization, personalization, and choice.

Abstract

This experiment examined the effects on the learning process of 3 complementary strategies—contextualization, personalization, and provision of choices—for enhancing students' intrinsic motivation. Elementary school children in 1 control and 4 experimental conditions worked with educational computer activities designed to teach arithmetical order-ofoperations rules. In the control condition, this material was presented abstractly. In the experimental conditions, identical material was presented in meaningful and appealing learning contexts, in either generic or individually personalized form. Half of the students in each group were also offered choices concerning instructionally incidental aspects of the learning contexts; the remainder were not. Contextualization, personalization, and choice all produced dramatic increases, not only in students' motivation but also in their depth of engagement in learning, the amount they learned in a fixed time period, and their perceived competence and levels of aspiration. Learning, every parent knows, can be fun. From the dogged dedication of the infant learning to walk and the voraciousness of the toddler first learning the names of objects to the insatiable curiosity of the preschooler wanting to know the why behind everything, astute observers from Plato to Piaget have remarked upon young children's intrinsic love for learning. There are, it appears, no preschool children with motivational deficits. Yet only a few years later, after these same children have entered school, their motivation to learn has somehow become decidedly more problematic. Many of them seem to find the instructional activities in schools to be dull and