Education theories

nThe education instructors have adopted a number of teaching theories to enable teachers to gain conscious learning in education. The teaching theories are meant to make teaching as easy as possible and reduce the negative perception of the subjects. The theories identify the motivating factors in learning from student. The learners should be motivated to ensure that learning creates friendly environment for the students.

nExpectancy-Value Theory

nThis theory explains how people preferentially select task in achieving their motivation. In addition, it tries to investigate how people make efforts to achieve their goals in life. According to expectancy-value theory the performance of a person depends on the choice of task. This influences the person self-esteem and his/her ability to perform that task. The expectancy is the probability that his/her behavior will achieve the aim. In addition, the value is the significance level of that aim. In this regard, when an individual has many tasks to choose from, he/she will choose tasks that he regard as the highest in realization of his/her goals. An individual is motivated to perform a task that he/she considers easy, attractive and logical and he/she believes that he can accomplish it. Moreover, the behaviors of the person are outcomes of his desires or values of his beliefs. Therefore for a student to be motivated to perform a task, he needs to value the task and places more emphasis on the outcome. Furthermore, the student needs to have more belief in achieving the task at that particular time. The belief that a person will complete the task and the outcome expectancies that efforts will lead to desired outcomes. Therefore, an individual will perform better to a task that they belief that they have the ability. Most of the student will put extra efforts to subjects that they belief are easy and are attractive to them. Their efforts will lead to desired outcomes hence good performance. On the other hand students will not put less efforts to subjects they belief are difficult. Moreover, the theory shows that students decide which subjects are significant to them at young age and make judgments about the efficacies for a particular task. The theory has four characteristics, which are attainment value, intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation and perceived cost. Attainment value relates to the value that a student places on achieving a particular task. For instance if the student want to become good in mathematics, he is motivated to doing a lot of math. However, if the student is not motivated for math, he ends up not doing any math at all. Intrinsic motivation describes the internal characteristics that a student has in a subject. These include the personal enjoyment and personal satisfaction. Students perform well in music because they enjoy singing. Extrinsic motivation refers being interested in a particular subject to achieve an aim not being not related to the subject performance. For instance, these include the external awards that benefit the student. For example gifts from parents and teachers. Perceived cost relates to the negative aspect of learning the subject. Students will not be motivated to a particular subject because it will consume a lot of time for their sports, sleep time and other activities in life.

nFlow theory

nThe theory of flow is to investigate by examining theories of motivation for instrument. This theory explains that the individual is motivated to perform the task that brings happiness to him/her. However, a balance between the level of difficulty and level of skills creates pleasure in performance of the task. When there is no balance between the level of skills and the level of difficulty of the task, it lead to negative outcome in terms of motivation. In addition, if the task is very easy and a person has high level of skills it will lead to boredom. On the other hand, when the task is very difficult, the skills levels required are low, and it raises anxiety. If the task is easy and the skills levels are low, it will lead to apathy. If both the level of skills and the level of challenge are high, flow will occur. This balance of flow occurs in education from the level of skills and the level of challenge. For instance, a student who is learning a task in mathematics for the first time may have difficulty at the beginning. His anxiety increases since he will not consider his level of skills to be enough to perform the task as instructed. However, as he practices the task, he will learn the skills and the flow will occur while practicing. Then, once he practices, he gains high level of skills and it exceeds the level of difficulty. At this point, the learner will be bored with practicing and he/she will lose the motivation to practice the task. The flow theory require the following criteria; clear goals and feedback, activities requiring skills, concentration on the given task, loss of self-consciousness, sense of control and transformation of time. The flow process is the most important concept in learning environment. For instance, when individuals encounters difficult task for which they have highly developed skills, they gain high pleasure for that tasks. Their thoughts begin to flow on how to perform the task before beginning the task.