How to Develop Motivation in Students towards Science Subjects

 

We live in an increasingly technological society with a large amount of information at our disposal, for this reason, the teaching of science is an essential element to train citizens with a full social conscience. However, several studies have shown that there is a tendency toward the lack of motivation of students towards science subjects and a worrying drift toward scientific illiteracy.

A student who enjoys the classes is a student who wants to go to class, takes an active part in it (asks questions, proposes topics,...), presents a participatory attitude promoting that his classmates understand the subject, and learning is easy and fun.

The teaching and learning process is determined by the motivation that the student feels before the development of the subject.

“[…] from a cognitive point of view, motivation is related to aspects such as the reasons why people decide to act in specific ways and the factors that influence the choices they make. It also involves decisions such as the amount of effort people are willing to put forth […]. Thus, the role of the teacher is summarized as ensuring that students make appropriate decisions. (Williams and Burden, 1999, p. 130)

It is clear that a very important role in the motivation before the sciences corresponds to the teacher, since he is in charge of directing the activity of the students and who will be responsible for acquiring the appropriate habits for their correct development. Every teaching-learning process must start from a rigorous planning of what is intended to be achieved, being clear about the objectives or goals, what resources are necessary, what didactic methods are the most appropriate, and how learning is evaluated and feedback is provided. process.

And is that the main factor of school failure with respect to science subjects lies in the fact that students do not feel motivated to learn them. In general, it is observed that they see science as: impractical in their daily life, hardly interesting, and they consider that they comprise a set of isolated knowledge that they are not capable of internalizing.

Likewise, the didactic methods have to be chosen based on what is known to be optimal to achieve the proposed goals and based on the conditions in which the teaching takes place. In this way and as described by José Antonio Marina in his book "Objective: Generate talent", a teacher who intends to develop these skills in their students must (Marina, JA 2016, p. 92):

• Have a clear mind. You must be clear about what your students want to achieve. It should not be a general and vague goal, but the purpose of learning should be perfectly defined.
• Know how to improve performance and teach the student to apply it. A good teacher should not be limited to simply giving theoretical advice but should teach concrete methods to achieve performance at all times. It is necessary to know and involve the student in the different learning techniques.
• Plan the training, and mark the progress guidelines, for each student. The teacher must know what their students need to progress, they must be very clear about their final objective and which is that the student must achieve their autonomy in learning.
• Give continuous and immediate feedback on how the student is doing. You must know at all times if she is doing it right or wrong. The educational evaluation must be very close to the fact evaluated. Tests that are graded and returned to students a week later with a grade have no educational value. They are limited only to being control elements.
• Help support training, which is usually boring. A workout is based on directed repetition until perfection is achieved. A good teacher must manage so that this repetition stops being boring and is attractive to the students. Motivation must be increased by recognizing the merits and awareness of the effort. A good teacher should plan goals so that they are difficult enough to be successful, but not so difficult that failure is very likely.
• Demonstrate and transmit a “growth attitude”. There is an important influence on learning the previous beliefs of students about their own abilities to progress. Students who consider themselves capable of overcoming obstacles obtain better results than those who are doomed to failure before even trying. It is the task of the teacher to prosecute this mentality of the students in order to improve their results.

In this way, we see how looking for an adequate relationship between scientific subjects and the daily life of the students can thus show them aspects that will be more suitable for correct Scientific Literacy. Students with their training should be able to have a critical attitude and be able to answer questions such as, for example: knowing whether or not it is good to eat transgenic food, or what they think should be invested in research topics.

Likewise, we can affirm that the lack of motivation towards science is determined to a large extent by the decontextualization in which they are taught. Therefore, the starting point to improve the attitude of the students is that the teachers stop teaching it as something purely abstract and make it become something interesting and close. In this sense, teachers should seek to be simply participants in a theoretical exposition of mathematical and scientific concepts, and act more as what is understood by "good trainers".teaching and learning