STRATEGIES FOR ATTITUDE CHANGE, MOTIVATION, AND INTEREST

Attitude is a person's view on something. Attitude affects the choices that people make. Since attitude influences how students behave and the choices they make instruction to change attitudes or influence attitude formation is important. Interests and motivation are also important. Instructors want students to be interested in what is going on during instruction and they want them to want to take part in the instruction that is going on. The areas of motivation and interests that instructors are most concerned about are competence, curiousity, autonomy, volition, and goal-orientation.

Attitude instruction is often influenced by psychological theories. The following are some of those theories.

The Yale Communication and Attitude Change: This approach stresses reinforcement and the neccessity to address the cognitive elements of beliefs and opinions.

Festinger's Cognitive Dissonance Theory: This theory stresses the importance of the cognitive element of dissonance and the reduction of dissonance.

Cognitive Balancing: This theory involves balancing and accomodating inconsitencies in an individual's beliefs.

Social Judgment Theory: This theory describes how attitudes change through the judgment process.

Social Learning Theory: This approach describes attitude change through learning from direct experience, vicarious experience, experiences gained through reading or listening, or through emotional associations.

There are three components of attitude.

Cognitive: This component involves the student knowing about the subject that teachers are trying to influence the attitudes on.

Behavorial: This component involves having the students engage in the behavior that you want them to display

Affective: This component involves the urge to want to perform the desired behavior.

There have been many different methods of categorizing the types of learning objectives in the affective method. One of these methods the Krathwohl Taxonomy. This taxomomy is broken down into five parts: attending, responding, valuing, organization, and characterization.

There are three conditions necessary for successful attitude learning. These conditions are demonstration of the desired behavior by a respected role model, practice of the desired behavior, and reinforcement of the desired behavior.

In the area of motivation and interest the four conditions necessary for successful interest and motivation learning are found in Keller's ARCS Model. These conditions are attention, relevance, confidence and satisfaction.

There are different strategies that can be employed to teach motivation instruction. The following are some of these strategies.

Attention strategies: There are six kinds of attention strategies. Incongruity and conflict has the teacher introduce something that contradicts with students experiences or take the opposite side during a discussion of an issue. Concreteness involves teachers using concrete verbal presentations or visual presentations to introduce a presentation. During variablility the students attention is gained and maintained through the use of voice changes, movements, instructional format, medium of instruction, layout and design of print material, or changes in interaction patterns. Humor is the use of puns, joke, or humorous analogies to gain attention while inquiry involves the use of problems solving activities. Participation has students taking part in activities that involve active participation of the learner like role playing and simulations.

Relevance strategies: There are also six relevance strategies. Experience involves telling learners how new material will use their existing skills, using analogies to relate current material to prior knowledge, and relating to learner interests. Present worth informs learners how the strategy can be useful to the student at the present time while future usefullness shows how the strategy will be useful in the future. Need matching involves activities that give students the opportunity to achieve. Modeling has people acting as role models and choice allows students to use their own methods to organize their work.

Confidence strategies: There are five confidence strategies. Learning requirements involves telling students what is going to be taught. Difficulty involves sequencing materials in order of increasing difficulty. Expectations involve helping students acquire positive outlooks toward working with the material. Attribution involves helping students attribute their successes to effort. Self-confidence involves techniques that help build self-confidence.

Satisfaction strategies: There are also five satisfaction strategies. Natural consequences involves maximizing the positive consequences of learning. Unexpected rewards involves making boring tasks more rewarding by providing rewards that the learner can look forward to. During positive outcomes the instructor provides positive feedback following the task. Negative influences involves the avoidance of negative practices like using threats. Scheduling refers to the use of reinforcement when you are teaching a new task.

Here are some ways that instruction events can be adapted when teaching lessons on attitude change or improving motivation and interests.

1. Introduction

To deploy attention, establish instructional purpose, arouse interest, and preview the lesson during a lesson that teaches attitude learning the instructor could describe a situation where the attitude they want learned will be use. During a lesson on motivation and interest humor or incongruity can be used to gain attention. The instructional purpose can be established by establishing the learning requirements and expectations and interest and motivation can be aroused by showing the students how the information will be useful to them now and in the future.

2. Body

To activate prior knowledge and process information during a lesson on attitude instructors should have the students tell how they would respond to the described situation and then they should discuss what the results of these responses might be. For a lesson on motivation and interest the instructor should employ the strategies of concreteness and variablility during the the information process stage. They should also show students the relevance of the information.
To focus attention and employ learning strategies instructors can employ two different approaches. They can apply the persuasive communication technique to describe the consequences of the desired approach or they could continue with the described scenario and have the person in the scenario handle the situation using the desired approach.
During an attitude lesson practice and feedback can be gained through group discussion or role-playing. For motivation lessons instructors can employ different motivational strategies. They can use need matching, difficulty, attribution, self-confidence, unexpected rewards, or positive outcomes.
In the employment of learning strategies during motivation lessons learners should be taught to employ many of the strategies themselves and promote their own interest and motivation.

3. Conclusion

To conclude a lesson on attitude instructors should restate the desired behavior. Lessons on motivation and interest should emphasize how the material can be used in the future.

4. Assessment

There are three types of assessment instruments that can be used to assess attitude learning: direct self-report, indirect self-report. Direct self-report instruments predict whether learners will behave in a desired manner. Indirect self-report instruments are questionnaires that present scenarios where there is competition for the person's time or resources to determine a students commitment toward the desired behavior. Observation allows instructors to see what the students would actually do in a situation. For lessons involving motivation and interest need matching and natural consequences should be use. Need matching provides students with opportunites to achieve and natural consequences allows them to help others learn the skill after they have achieved mastery.

To show an example of lesson teaching attitude learning or motivation learning might by taught. I have provided a lesson that teaches attitude learning.

Objectives:
The students will practice digital ethics and respect intellectual property rules when conducting research using the Internet.

1. Introduction

To gain student attention and arouse interest ask students whether you can own an idea. Then ask them what if that idea took the form of an invention, song, or design. Next, ask students what rights should the person who came up with the idea have and how should these rights be protected.

2. Body

To process the information begin by telling students about intellectual property. Then go through the following websites and discuss them with the students. Then have a discussion with these students about breaking these kinds of rules and have them tell you why violating these rules is wrong.
http://www.utsystem.edu/OGC/IntellectualProperty/faculty.htm http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html
http://www.microsoft.com/piracy/basics/

3. Conclusion

To conclude the lesson restate that intellectual property rules protect peoples works and tell students that when doing Internet research they need to respect these rules and follow them.

4. Assessment

To assess whether students will follow Intellectual Property rules have the students complete a questionnaire with various scenarios dealing with copyright issues and observe them during Internet research to make sure they respect copyright laws.