Pedagogical sciences/2.Modern methods of teaching
Motivation as
a Major Aspect of Study
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Ort Hermelin Academic College,
Netanya,Israel yakovr@hermelin.ac.il |
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Keywords: motivation,cognitive technology,fundamental approach, study of physics.
How
to teach a modern student? This is an eternal question, as the objectives,
content and methods of education must meet the needs of an ever-changing
reality. In our intellectually intense and fast-paced, high-tech environment,
the abundance of information often exceeds one's perception. Thus, new
approaches are required in order to maintain effective teaching. Furthermore,
the educational process is in need of new pedagogical approaches that will
prepare students to work in today's constantly overloaded environment.
Information exchange between people and their surrounding is now at a
faster rate than it was 20-30 years ago. The increase in the rate of growth of
information develops cognitive human activity. Hence, a primary aspect of
modern education should be the formation of information competence of students.
Under these new conditions, new teaching
methodologies must be created in order to provide the students tools for
effective understanding of the real world and successful adaptation to life in
the supersaturated environment, as well as information and intellectual
development.
The essence of cognitive technology in
teaching is providing the students' understanding of educational information.
For this system assignments are created according to the principle:
"Where, in any communicative situation it is useful to me". Tutorials
should be prepared at different levels of cognitive development of students and
create assignments at different levels of complexity. The task of the teacher
is not only to raise security questions, and review the performance of
students, but also to form the students' ability to self-esteem, self-control
by involving it in an open discussion of "their" and
"foreign" speech.
Student
motivation is a necessary component of education which must be maintained
throughout the process of learning. The motivation or desire to learn can be
divided into two types: the desire of the end result, and the motivation for
everyday learning.
We
describe in this paper our experience accumulated over the years of teaching in
engineering faculties in Ort Hermelin Academic College (Netanya)
(Rosh, 2012). All incoming students say they dream of
becoming engineers and will invest all their efforts to achieve this goal. This
reflects their desire of the final result. In our opinion it is
useless. As a result, many students drop out after the first semester. Only
those students that are ready for the daily, enormous effort required for
higher education reach the final result.
Motivation is rapidly reduced if the level
of the tasks does not match the level of training of the student. We use two
methods to support the students' desire to learn. First, during the lectures we
are involving students in the process of teaching by asking many questions.
Thus the students get the impression that they themselves reach the desired
result. Second, the problems for homework assignments are chosen so that one or
more of the tasks address knowledge gaps, this requiring a search in textbooks
or on the internet.
All this stimulates cognitive human
activity. Another important aspect having a positive impact
on student motivation is providing them with the ability to see how the
individual parts add up to a whole (Efremova, 2007). It is a challenge of the lecturer to teach students
according to such a fundamental approach (Hewitt,
2011). Here are some examples of drawing up such
puzzles.
1) The equation of a simple harmonic
oscillator describes the various physical phenomena: the oscillation mass on a
spring, pendulum motion, motion of objects in a circle, the motion of charges
in the electrical circuit LC, harmonic oscillator in quantum mechanics.
2) Accelerators, satellites and atoms as an
example circular motion.
3) Electric current and hydrodynamics.
In the future, we believe that courses
should be created describing the connection between related phenomena from
different fields of science.
Reference
1. Rosh F., Rutman
Y.(2012), The way from practical engineer to engineer (poster), The 7-th Chais Conference for Innovation in
Learning Technologies.Israel.p.310.
2. Efremova N.A., Rudkovskaya, V.F. & Sklyarova,
E.A. (2007). The importance of a fundamental approach to the study of physics at the
university. Fundamental studies, 5, 41-44.
3.
Hewitt, P.G. (2011). Equations as guides to thinking and problem
solving. The Physics Teacher, 49(5), 264.