Literacy and Intrinsic Motivation

Abstract

It has turned out that mass literacy is not as easy to achieve as educational reformers had anticipated. To close the gap between the rather dismal reality and the golden future envisaged, researchers and practitioners are investing their energies in teaching methods modeled on computers and other rational means for processing information? which in turn were modeled on industrial production techniques and on military human systems design. The implicit hope is that if we discover more and more rational ways of selecting, organizing, and conveying knowledge, children will learn more effectively. Yet it seems increasingly clear that the chief impediments to literacy are not cognitive in nature. It is not that students cannot learn; it is that they do not wish to. Computers do not suffer from motivational problems, whereas human beings do. We have not found ways as yet to program children so that they will learn the information we present to them, as computers do. Unfortunately, cognitive science has not taken adequate notice of this fact, and hence the current cognitive emphasis on teaching is missing out on an essential component of what learning is about. This essay will raise some motivational issues involved in achieving literacy, in the hope of reminding educators of the importance of this

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 128 citations exist upstream.