Motivation: A Neglected Component in Models for Curriculum Improvement

The last ten years of curriculum reform have been dominated by discussion of educational objectives. Curriculum workers know well how to express the purposes of a course, but less well how to describe a learning atmosphere in which these purposes may be pursued. In the individual classroom a teacher might have very clear objectives, yet-fail to achieve anything because he is unable to create a productive learning atmosphere. Conversely, of course, a good atmosphere may be inadequately exploited if the teacher lacks clear objectives. Students' motivation is of crucial importance and yet present curriculum models devote much more attention to objectives than to how to engage students' interest and effort. Our contention is that this is because we lack an adequate way of discussing how children can be motivated. In the first part of this paper we propose a method of clarifying such discussions so as to make explicit the consequences for curriculum design, and in the second part we describe its use in the current work of the Science Teacher Education Project.