The Impact Of Evaluation Styles On Infants’ Intrinsic Motivation In Competitive Situations

Many theorists have debated whether activities should be structured in a competitive manner to promote motivation and performance(Johnson 1990; Slavin, 1996).According to Deci and Ryan(2000)Cognitive Evaluation Theory,one of the key factors that influence an individual’s intrinsic motivation is perceived sense of control.When individuals feel in the event that they have a strong sense of control, then be able to promote them more internal attribution, thereby enhancing intrinsic motivation;On the contrary, people in threatened and supervision controlling environment,reduce their sense of self-determination, and thus would undermine intrinsic motivation.Therefore,in the course of competition,different competitive contexts have different effects on intrinsic motivation. What are influences of different competitive situation and competitive results on infants’ s intrinsic motivation for engaging in activities? What are the functions of different ways of evaluation for infants and adult who fail in competitions? At present, such studies are limited. In order to explore these issues, the research randomly chose 256 infants from a kindergarten in Jilin Changchun as subjects, and will adopt experimental method to create independent support and controlled competition situations. The result shows that:(1) The competition itself has no significant effect on infants’ s intrinsic motivation, but different situations do have. That is to say, infants’ s intrinsic motivation in the independent support situation is significant higher than those in controlled situation. But under controlled environment, to some extent competition increases the fun of task, so infants of competitive group have more enjoyable and persistence than infants of non-competitive group.(2)Different results of the competition have an impact on infants’ s intrinsic motivation, which is, infants who win have higher intrinsic motivation than those who lose. In addition, the results of the competition affects the evaluation of their own ability, And the winners have higher evaluation for their abilities than losers.Winner in the supportive competitive environment have higher levels of intrinsic motivation, and loser in controlled competitive environment have lower levels of intrinsic motivation.(3)In general,the verbal evaluation is better to buffer the effect of failure to infant’s intrinsic motivation.For younger infants, the task merriness between hard orientation evaluation group and ability evaluation group has no significant differences,but the infants of hard orientation verbal evaluation tend to have a longer persistence.This means that younger infants have shown preference for hard orientation verbal evaluation.For older infants,the intrinsic motivation of hard orientation evaluation group is significantly higher than the other two groups.So the article argues that older infants have formed the concept of general ability.For infants who fail the competition, effort orientation evaluation is better to buffer failed to the bad influence of intrinsic motivation.