how educators can play an instrumental role in shaping the motivational goals, the expectancy-related beliefs and the subjective task values of the students. Depending on the assignments, the classroom assessment, the instructional approaches adopted, the classroom structure and the overall classroom environment, educators play a critical role in shaping the students' motivational processes (Miller & Meece, 1997; Stefanou & Parkes, 2003; Wehby, Falk, Barton-Arwood, Lane, & Cooley, 2003; Self-Brown & Mathews, 2003; Dolezal, Welsh, Pressley, & Vincent, 2003; Turner, Midgley, & Patrick, 2003). For instance, educators who place a strong emphasis on students obtaining high grades in assessments, instead of acquiring critical higher level thinking abilities, encourage students to learn simply to outperform others or to earn extrinsic rewards. As a result, their students only learn in order to demonstrate their competence; therefore, they will avoid doing challenging learning tasks that will illuminate their weaknesses (Stefanou & Parkes, 2003).
This above discussion thus demonstrates clearly how the investigation of motivation in elementary school classroom will contribute to every facet of the educational practices of teachers. Knowing how they affect their students' motivational process will provide educators with new ideas for improving their instructional strategies, their curriculum design and planning, as well as their class management approaches. Through the knowledge derived from this paper, educators will also be able to increase the motivational levels of their students.
In this literature review, the findings of eight research-based articles concerning the role of motivation in elementary school classrooms will be examined. To provide greater coherence to this discussion, they will be organized based on their theoretical models or their themes.
The first three research studies focused their study on the goal or...