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Monday, June 10, 2013

The fiction of most school mission statements | Dangerously Irrelevant

The fiction of most school mission statements | Dangerously Irrelevant:

The fiction of most school mission statements

Over at the PsyBlog, they note that there are only two reasons why we do anything:
  1. Because we want to
  2. Because someone else wants us to
The former is what we term intrinsic motivation. The latter is what we call extrinsic motivation.
Summarizing the work of the famous motivation researchers Edward Deci and Richard Ryanthe PsyBlog folks state that three factors are at the core of intrinsic motivation:
  1. Competence. We want to be good at something. Things that are too easy, though, don’t give us a sense of competence; it has to be just hard enough.
  2. Autonomy. We want to be free and dislike being controlled. When people have some freedom – even