Motivating masters

Motivation is the powerful inner force that drives all of our thoughts, feelings and actions. One of the critical differences between a champion athlete and an also-ran entails how they are able to maintain intensity of effort over time. Elite athletes such as 45-year-old sprinter Merlene Ottey, who competed in her 7th Olympics in Athens 2004, have the propensity to direct their energies extremely effectively. We will be examining how motivation contributes to success for masters athletes and suggest some motivational techniques which you can tailor to your athletes’ needs

Deflationary Pluralism about Motivating Reasons

This paper takes a closer look at ordinary thought and talk about motivating reasons, in an effort to better understand how it works. This is an important first step in understanding whether—and if so, how—such thought and talk should inform or constrain our substantive theorizing. One of the upshots is that ordinary judgments about motivating reasons are at best a partial and defeasible guide to what really matters, and that so-called factualists, propositionalists, and statists are all partly right, as well as partly wrong, when it comes to the question of what motivating reasons “are”

Motivating Altruism: A Field Study

This paper analyzes the effects of a legislative provision that grants a one-day paid leave of absence to blood donors who are employees in Italy. The analysis is based on a unique dataset with the complete donation histories of the blood donors in an Italian town. The cross-sectional variation in job market status and type of employers, and job switching over time by a subset of donors, are the sources of variation we employ to study whether donors are responsive to the paid-day-off incentive in the choice of their donation days, and in the frequency of their donations. Our results indicate that economic considerations do affect blood donation decisions, for donors donate in days of the week that, given the day-off benefit, maximize their material returns in terms of consecutive days off work. We also find evidence, however, consistent with heterogeneous motivations in different donors, since a subset of donors systematically do not take advantage of the material reward. Finally, we find that the day-off privilege leads donors who are employees to make, on average, one extra donation per year. We discuss the implications of our findings for policies aimed at increasing the supply of blood, and more generally for incentivizing pro-social behavior.incentives, altruism, public good provision, pro-social behavior, public health

A reason-based theory of rational choice

The standard rational choice paradigm explains an individual’s preferences by his beliefs and his fundamental desires. For instance, someone’s preference for joining the army might be explained by certain beliefs about what life in the army is like and a desire for such a life. While beliefs may change (by new information), fundamental desires are totally fixed. One shortcoming of this paradigm is that reasons and motivations play no explicit role. Some of the more fundamental preference changes that one can undergo seem to reach beyond information-learning and to involve a change in the reasons or goals by which one is fundamentally motivated. Such changes of motivating reasons may come in connection with a changing ability to abstractly represent certain aspects of the world (like the thirteenth move in a game) or to imagine certain qualitative aspects of the world (like feelings of complete loneliness). Standard rational choice models implicitly assume away such changes. This paper proposes a formal reason-based model of preferences. The model explains an individual’s preferences by the set of reasons that motivate him. The preference of our example individual for joining the army would be explained by the set of reasons that motivate him, such as service to his country, an athletic body, and comradeship. Preference change in our model thus stems not exclusively from new information but often also from a change of the set of motivating reasons. If our example individual suddenly loses his preference for joining the army and joins a charity, new reasons (such as worldwide justice) might have become motivating while others (such as an athletic body) might have lost their motivational power. Our notion of a ‘(motivating) reason’ is open to different interpretations and applications, like ones related to conceptualisation or imagination abilities. We formulate two natural axioms on reason-based preferences, the first ensuring that preferences are determined by the motivating reasons and the second ensuring that preferences change in a coherent way as additional reasons become motivating. These two axioms are shown to imply a parsimonious representation of preferences: a single binary relation (which ranks the consistent reason sets) is sufficient to generate all individual preferences across possible individual states (i.e., possible sets of motivating reasons).mathematical economics;

Motivating Strategies Leaders Employ to Increase Follower Effort

The purpose of this research was to determine which motivating strategies followers desire from their leaders and what motivating strategies are actually displayed by their leaders to increase followers’ effort. Additionally, this research assessed the followers’ level of self-reported extra effort and the amount of extra effort followers perceive their leaders exert. From this data, conclusions were drawn regarding the relationships between followers’ self-reported extra effort and the followers’ perception of their leaders’ extra effort. This quantitative research study was conducted via LinkedIn using Survey Monk ey and is based on Keller’s 42 item ARCS Model (attention, relevance, confidence, and satisfaction). Regression analysis of the survey responses indicated that: 1) Followers perceive their leaders are not displaying the level of motivating strategies desired; 2) The amount of extra effort that followers perceive that their leaders exert is significant in predicting the amount of extra effort that followers exert; and 3) Followers’ perception is that leaders’ extra effort is less than followers’ extra effort. The findings suggest that leaders should be more aware of the motivating strategies that followers desire and demonstrate those strategies since leaders’ extra effort is a significant predictor of followers’ extra effort. Additionally, leaders should also exert the level of effort that they desire from their followers

Motivating Weak Students: A Critical Discussion and Reflection

The motivation of students is regarded as one of the problems in the higher education. One of the reasons for the increasing number of students with low-level of motivation is that there are many students join universities without adequate level of preparation. consequently, because of complex material delivered to students and their low ability to learn quickly, the motivation of students to learn Computer Aided Design (CAD) and other software packages be decreased significantly during educational process. The means of multimedia can be used in teaching the technology to help in solving this problem. The basic idea of proposed approach is to use the video clips, multimedia applications in the teaching process. The basic material should be accessible by students at any time. In order to do this, the material mentioned above should be published in E-learn. These video clips will help students in doing some exercises on their own time and independently which they may miss and can be used by students at later times when they prepare their design work using CAD. The accessibility of material and its possibility to repeat it a lot of time may increase the level of student’s knowledge gained and have improved their motivation. Keywords: Motivation, Diversity, CAD, Technology, Feedbac

Black Single Custodial Fathers: Factors Influencing the Decision to Parent

This pilot study combined narrative and quantitative data to explore the factors enabling and motivating single African American fathers to take full custody of one or more of their children. The size and selection of the sample does not allow for generalization, since most of the men were college-educated and financially stable. The findings indicated a distinction between enabling and motivating factors. Factors that appeared to enable full custody included employment and secure housing, as they were present for all of the fathers before they took custody. Adult age at the time of their first child’s birth was also a factor for 9 of the 10 fathers. Prior parental involvement, previous marital status, and maternal incompetence did not appear to be highly associated with the choice to take custody. However, the narrative data indicated that the desire to embody the kind of father they themselves did not have was a strong motivating factor

Multimedia motion: Motivating learners

The Multimedia Motion CD‐ROM is used as part of the teaching for the Supported Learning in Physics (SLIP) project, an Open University‐led project to develop open and flexible learning materials in physics for use by post‐16 students in schools and colleges. Multimedia Motion enables students to chart and analyse a range of movements: displacement, velocities, accelerations, etc. of a variety of people and vehicles. During the pilot phase of the project, we conducted an evaluation of the CD‐ROM‐based activities. The evaluation consisted of observations of teacher and student use of the material in two schools, augmented with data obtained from questionnaires administered in a further two schools. The resulting data raises a number of issues about how exploratory learning can best be supported by multimedia. We observed the expected benefits of increased motivation for learners because of access to more realistic applications of the laws of physics illustrated on the disc. However, several others factors appeared to be important to students when using it. In this paper, we explore how teachers’ and students’ perceptions of the task involved in learning post‐16 physics must be addressed in designing suitable multimedia presentations and exercises