Lecture

Motivation and Learning: Understanding Interest Dynamics

Graph Chat

Chat with Graph Search

Ask any question about EPFL courses, lectures, exercises, research, news, etc. or try the example questions below.

DISCLAIMER: The Graph Chatbot is not programmed to provide explicit or categorical answers to your questions. Rather, it transforms your questions into API requests that are distributed across the various IT services officially administered by EPFL. Its purpose is solely to collect and recommend relevant references to content that you can explore to help you answer your questions.

In course

HUM-432: How people learn: Designing Learning Tools I

The students will understand the cognitive and social factors which affect learning - particularly in science and engineering. They will be able to use social research techniques as part of the design process to understand end users. ...

Description

This lecture explores the importance of motivation in learning, distinguishing between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. It delves into the concept of interest as a dynamic feature of interaction, emphasizing the role of effort in the acquisition of knowledge. The instructor discusses how our brain tends to conserve energy, favoring automatic processes over analytical thinking. The presentation highlights the impact of interest on learning outcomes, drawing on studies that demonstrate how interest is influenced by factors such as relevance, novelty, and cognitive engagement.

Instructors (2)

Nihat Kotluk

Dr. Kotluk is currently a post-doc at the EPFL. He focuses mainly on emotions in the decision-making process, moral reasoning, and ethics in Engineering Education. He also works on equality and diversity issues. He has an academic background in both STEM and social sciences. Dr. Kotluk has acquired advanced skills in education, inclusive pedagogy, and science teachers' training. He has 14 years of teaching experience and has trained high school students in physics and teachers in pedagogy and research methods, among others. Dr. Kotluk has strong teaching and learning communication skills. He holds a Ph.D. in Educational Science, Curriculum, and Instruction. In his thesis, he studied the perceptions and practices of educators in culturally relevant pedagogy and developed recommendations to put more emphasis on inclusion in pre-service teacher education. With his research, he opened a new discussion in the academic community in Turkey and internationally. In his recent work, he analyzes the educational challenges facing refugee communities and other marginalized groups. In the study, he focused on whether and how teachers implemented the principles of culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogies and the challenges teachers faced while trying to implement these principles with Syrian students in Turkey. In his more recent work, he has studied moral emotions, moral reasoning in engineering ethics, and equality and diversity issues in engineering education. His teaching and research interests include emotions in engineering education, culturally responsive STEM education, equity and diversity in education, and multicultural education.

Roland John Tormey

I am a sociologist and learning scientist researching and teaching on engineering education. I'm particularly focused on the roles of emotion and self-regulation in engineering teaching and learning. My profile is accessible here.

Official source

Related concepts (14)

Motivation

Motivation is the reason for which humans and other animals initiate, continue, or terminate a behavior at a given time. Motivational states are commonly understood as forces acting within the agent that create a disposition to engage in goal-directed behavior. It is often held that different mental states compete with each other and that only the strongest state determines behavior. This means that we can be motivated to do something without actually doing it. The paradigmatic mental state providing motivation is desire.

Work motivation

Work motivation is a person's internal disposition toward work. To further this, an incentive is the anticipated reward or aversive event available in the environment. While motivation can often be used as a tool to help predict behavior, it varies greatly among individuals and must often be combined with ability and environmental factors to actually influence behavior and performance. Results from a 2012 study, which examined age-related differences in work motivation, suggest a "shift in people's motives" rather than a general decline in motivation with age.

Learning

Learning is the process of acquiring new understanding, knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, attitudes, and preferences. The ability to learn is possessed by humans, animals, and some machines; there is also evidence for some kind of learning in certain plants. Some learning is immediate, induced by a single event (e.g. being burned by a hot stove), but much skill and knowledge accumulate from repeated experiences. The changes induced by learning often last a lifetime, and it is hard to distinguish learned material that seems to be "lost" from that which cannot be retrieved.

Language acquisition

Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language (in other words, gain the ability to be aware of language and to understand it), as well as to produce and use words and sentences to communicate. Language acquisition involves structures, rules, and representation. The capacity to use language successfully requires one to acquire a range of tools including phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and an extensive vocabulary.

Second-language acquisition

Second-language acquisition (SLA), sometimes called second-language learning — otherwise referred to as L2 (language 2) acquisition, is the process by which people learn a second language. Second-language acquisition is also the scientific discipline devoted to studying that process. The field of second-language acquisition is regarded by some but not everybody as a sub-discipline of applied linguistics but also receives research attention from a variety of other disciplines, such as psychology and education.

Related lectures (63)

The Final Word

Reflects on the journey taken throughout the year and encourages students to persevere.

Sensory learning with neural networks

Explores sensory representations, perception, memory, cognitive control, and neural networks.

Interaction and Biases in Learning

Discusses the impact of interaction, biases, and feedback on learning tools and educational settings.

Ethical Engineering: Learning and Bias

Covers motivation, bias, stress, and learning routines in education, emphasizing the impact of social identity and unconscious biases.

Cognitive Process of Learning and Motivation in Learning