Cognitive Neuroscience Perspectives on Motivation and Learning: Revisiting Self‐Determination Theory     

Ela Luria  Maya Shalom  Daniel A. Levy 《Mind, Brain, and Education》2021,15(1):5-17

The Self‐Determination Theory of motivation (SDT) has significantly guided educational policy and research. It maintains that learning succeeds when brought about by autonomous rather than controlled motivation, and that extrinsic reward motivation cannot engender effective learning. We present an alternative approach, rooted in recent insights from the neurobiology of memory. In exploring environments to reap rewards, people pursue interrogative goals, accompanied by dopamine‐based hippocampus activation, leading to the formation of rich relational memories. In contrast, seeking to avoid punishment or loss involves imperative goals, with amygdala activation driving the perirhinal cortex to form disjoint item memories. We suggest that structuring learning and evaluation to diminish failure and increase repeated opportunities for successful performance, as in gamification, may engender effective learning incorporating broad perspectives and rich associations. This may occur even in the absence of intrinsic motivation to master a particular subject. Employing this insight in instructional design may benefit many educational frameworks.  相似文献   

Private versus public financing of higher education: U.S. policy in comparative perspective     

Daniel Levy 《Higher Education》1982,11(6):607-628

Funding policies for higher education differ greatly from nation to nation and one of the major debates concerns the private-public mix. Five principal patterns emerge from the following variables: whether the system is comprised of just one sector or dual private-public sectors, the size of each sector (if there are dual sectors), the contribution of private funds to each sector, and the contribution of public funds to each sector. Beyond their defining empirical characteristics, each pattern is based on distinctive historical and normative rationales. Each therefore faces different policy choices within the more general private-public debate, although certain basic value questions commonly arise. Seen in comparative perspective, the United States continues to stand out for its significant dependence on private finance. This is because, compared to other developed nations, the United States still has an exceptionally large private sector with relatively great private finance and because, compared to almost all countries, the U.S. public sector also attracts substantial private income. There is great variation, however, and individual U.S. state systems may find useful counterparts to their empirical realities and policy dilemmas in certain foreign (national) systems.  相似文献   

Modeling Student Cognition in Digital and Nondigital Assessment Environments     

Kristen E. DiCerbo  Yuning Xu  Roy Levy  Emily Lai  Laura Holland 《Educational Assessment》2017,22(4):275-297

Inferences about student knowledge, skills, and attributes based on digital activity still largely come from whether students ultimately get a correct result or not. However, the ability to collect activity stream data as individuals interact with digital environments provides information about students’ processes as they progress through learning activities. These data have the potential to yield information about student cognition if methods can be developed to identify and aggregate evidence from diverse data sources. This work demonstrates how data from multiple carefully designed activities aligned to a learning progression can be used to support inferences about students’ levels of understanding of the geometric measurement of area. The article demonstrates evidence identification and aggregation of activity stream data from two different digital activities, responses to traditional assessment items, and ratings based on observation of in-person non-digital activity aligned to a common learning progression using a Bayesian Network approach.  相似文献