Motivation!

Academic Fears was a strategy I looked at to help me with motivation. The reason I am either motivated or un-motivated usually comes from fearing the outcome of an assignment. By looking at my academic fears, the outcomes and what I needed to do it helped me get motivated and know what I had to do in order to succeed.

What I did to complete this was look at my math and econ materials. I had test in both of them and needed to get motivated to study for each. I filled out the chart of my academic fears for math which were not understanding the concepts and failing or doing poorly on the exam. The worst outcome for both of these would be getting a bad grade on this test and it hurting my overall grade for the course. The best outcome would be understanding the material to use in the future and doing well on the exam to help my grade and do well. I decided that the action needed to be done was that I would go through all of my lecture notes very carefully, go in for office hours, read the textbook and spend a considerable amount of time doing practice problems. I decided this because all of these things would help me understand the material helping me doing well on the test, accomplishing both of my fears. This got me motivated to start to take these steps on. I day by day did each task by going over each chapter one by one and spending time practicing. I also went into office hours and asked questions and cleared up material I was confused about. This helped me a lot and I went into the test feeling confident.

I also did this for my ECN 203 quiz. My fears for this quiz were similar to my math test. I feared that I would not understand the concepts which were important for not only this test but for the final and doing poorly on this quiz. My worst outcome would be that I did badly on this quiz. The best outcome would be that I understood everything and did well on the quiz. The action that I needed to take in order to accomplish this was to go over the terms day by day and use strategies like LINKS to help me learn these definitions. Once again I was very motivated to get my best outcome possible so I followed the actions I planned out and felt confident going into my quiz at the end of the week.

I think that this is a great strategy for a visual and kinesthetic learner like myself. It lets you write out everything so you have a visual aid to help you know what you need to do in order to do well. This can work in any class with any type of assignment because it helps you get motivated to see what you can really accomplish. I think there are only positives to this strategy and I am going to use it in the future when I need a push to start and do assignments.