Abstract:

The growing social demand for lifelong and more effective school learning cannot be met without the development of self-regulated learning skills. Self-regulatory learning is a complex, interactive process that involves not only cognitive self-regulation but also motivational self-regulation. Without motivation, there is no learning, but the intensity and the type of the motivation changes during the learning activity. Learning motivation is self-regulated by the learner. In the literature four type of motivations are described: external, intrinsic, introjected, and identified.

In the case of external regulation, learning is done for external, non-learning goals. Intrinsic regulation exists when a motivated state is created by a learner's personality traits or characteristics of a learning situation in which the learner is driven by curiosity and interested to the learning content. For a pupil with introjected regulation learning becomes a moral obligation, gradually turn to be independent of external reinforces. Identified regulation is rooted in the nature of the child: the pupils have an innate need to increase their competence.

The aim of this paper is to present a research on primary school pupils’ motivation for learning. The research tool was the self-regulated learning questionnaire developed by Bacsa (2012), which contains affirmations measured on a 5-level Likert scale. 14 items related with motivation were selected and grouped in four categories: external, intrinsic, introjected, and identified regulation. The obtained data was quantitatively analyzed.

The results show that the identified motivation is the strongest in the participant pupils followed by the introjected motivation, and the intrinsic motivation is less developed in these pupils. These results highlight the necessity of using teaching methods which rise pupils’ curiosity and interest for learning.

Keywords:

Motivation, self-regulated learning, primary school, external regulation, intrinsic regulation, introjected regulation, identified regulation.