What Motivates Us?

In response to:  "RSA Animate - Drive:  The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

In this YouTube video that was uploaded by theRSAorg., a different, new kind of motivation is described in detail.  The video talks about a test that has been done on elementary students that is designed to motivate them using money as an incentive.  Students were given a set of jobs to complete and depending on how well they did those jobs, they would receive a given amount of money.  The better they did, the more money they would get.  The video states that this type of incentive for students only works with jobs pertaining to mechanical skills such as physical labor jobs.  When it came to jobs requiring cognitive thinking or creative thinking, the amount of incentive offered led to poorer performance.  When the test was repeated for workers in a poor rural area in India where $50 was worth a months worth of work, the test results came out the same.  The video states clearly that without PURPOSE, kids are not often willing to give their best effort even with an incentive being offered.  Teachers need to do their best to ensure that there is a purpose to all of the assignments and activities that we expect students to do each day.  This video was very interesting!