Case study: Elementary School
- Several of the students in your second grade class groan when it’s time for spelling. They dislike completing worksheets and find dictation exercises monotonous. Consequently, many of them do poorly on their weekly spelling quizzes and don’t seem to care.
1. I would start by changing the words to make them more appealing to the students' likes. I would let me pick out the words. I could do this by having them turn in words that they can think of randomly, from the dictionary, from the books that they are reading, or something else. If teacher's use things that students see or hear in their daily lives, they will be more interested in what they are learning. Instead of just filling out worksheets, I would set out stations for the students to work at. These stations could be: writing the spelling words with your non-dominant hand, typing the spelling words in different fonts and colors of your choice and printing it out, writing a riddle for each word, make an alliteration sentence for each spelling word, and then write out the spelling words with 3-4 markers in your hand at once. These activities could begin making spelling fun. If this can be done once a week and the activities be different every couple of weeks, this could be great for kids to think of spelling as fun. Also, in order to review the spelling words a day before the test, have the kids do a spelling bee. Whoever wins receives a prize like a bonus point on the test or go shoeless for a day. This would be where extrinsic motivation comes in.
2. To show my students that I value the process of learning, rather than the product, I would emphasize how important it is to learn the words that they hear every day, but may not know how to spell them. If I used words from their books and had them spell those on the tests, this could show how I think it is important to learn these words and use the spelling rules to help them spell new words they see or hear.
3. The students' values of the spelling section of class right now are nothing. It is hard to tell whether or not they have positive or negative expectancies at this time because I am not sure if they are doing poorly on the tests. If they are doing poorly, they have a negative expectancy towards the test because they are afraid of failing. My intrinsic motivation that I stated above would be using expectancy-value theory because it would give my students a positive expectancy for success and their intrinsic value would increase because they are satisfied or curious about spelling.
4. I think the expectancy-value theory would be most relevant because motivation has a lot riding on what your expectancy of the challenge is. Is it positive or negative? Also, the values being intrinsic or extrinsic, shape the amount of effort we put forth on something. With my changes in the lesson, etc., the students would have high values for spelling.
I really like the different stations you would have your students do to make spelling words more exciting. Learning spelling words can be very boring and would probably not inspire any form of motivation. I really like the idea of making riddles for the words, because that will also help with understanding the definitions of the words in a fun way, instead of just memorizing boring definitions. A lot of kids will probably want to make the most clever riddle in the class, and it could help them become more intrinsically motivated to learn how to make really good riddles, and in turn, learn how to spell the words and the definitions of the words. You could add more to that exercise by having them draw a picture to their riddle. This is always enjoyable to kids, because it does not only depend on learning, but also being creative.
ReplyDeleteI also like you will plan to show your students that the words they are learning about are relevant to their everyday life and how important it is to be able to recognize words and figure out what they mean in context. You could add intrinsic motivation to this as well by talking about how they will be able to read more interesting and difficult books that spark their interest and they can go on adventures through their reading.
I agree with you that the expectancy-value theory is most relevant in this case. Good job! I love your creativity in your changes to the lesson! In my mind, stations are ALWAYS the way to go!
-Sarah Isaacson