Dear Dr. Rengarajan,

I am not sure whether my answer helps you, but I will try. I have once learned that there should be an intrinsic motivation to learn and that external pressure should be in the medium range (i.e. pressure should neither be too high nor too low). For example, people should not be too anxious to fail if they study for an exam, as fear will hinder learning, but there should be an externally set deadline and the candidate should know that s/he needs to study towards fulfilling this deadline. I cannot give you any references, because it is a long time ago that I have learned this concept when being a student myself. But to me it makes sense.

In the meantime, there has probably been a lot of research in this field.

Best wishes and kind regards,

Rainer

Hi dear 

I hope this attached link will be useful to you. 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4536344/

Dear Rainer Spiegel

Thanks for your response. Some conjunctures  from your observations.

In a given set of learners, hailing from the families with diverse demographic features  

1)      How to do intrinsic motivation and what are the tools ? and

2)      Regarding external pressure , how to standardize the level of pressure for the said purposes?

3)      In fine does “one size fits for all” strategy work for sensitizing learning resulting learning efficiency?

Dr Rengarajan

Dear Liqaa Habeb

The attached link is interesting .  Some food for thought on the subject from pedagogical perspectives

The result that reveals presence of more challenges in internal factors leads to further probe as follows

1.       Why are they not able to adapt ?

2.       Why is there low efficacy?

3.       Why is there difficulty to plan the work efficiently?

4.       Are these internal  factors found  uniformly or variedly  among the sample learners

Studied?

Dear Dr Rengarajan,

I try to answer your questions.

1. intrinsic motivation. I would apply a questionnaire, in which I would ask participants to rate why they like to learn something. To create the questions, I would think of intrinsic and extrinsic motivators (intrinsic, e.g. passion for the learned content, extrinsic, e.g. monetary gratification). You would then need a group of students who answer the questions you created. I would recommend that you subsequently perform a factor analysis (independent components analysis) to find those questions that fit the intrinsic category best and others that fit the extrinsic category best. Subsequently, I would advise to select those questions for the questionnaire that represent intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.

2. The level of pressure is externally set, e.g. for all students in the class, the same content needs to be studied with the same deadlines. Therefore, you have standard conditions. To have standard conditions, it is necessary that all students have the same access to learning resources. Otherwise external pressure will differ a lot between students. It would also be ideal if all students had the same amount of time to prepare for the exam. For example, if some students need to work part time to finance their studies and others have a scholarship, the amount of external pressure cannot be compared, because the students who work have less time to dedicate to studying.

3. I personally do not think that a one size fits all approach is appropriate, because students usually have different access to resources. I would try to take these resources into account as good as possible before carrying out the study.

Best wishes and kind regards,

Rainer

Dear Rainer  Thanks for your response. However how to consider the factors like  rate of forgetting, slow learning, among the given set of students in both the cases of intrinsic and external pressure as well?

Dear Dr Rengarajan,

students certainly differ in terms of rate of forgetting and learning speed. But if you design a questionnaire in education or the social sciences, you will always have these types of differences. When you do the validation of your questionnaire by studying a large enough number of students, however, I would assume that these aspects (speed of learning, rate of forgetting, etc.) are normally distributed among the students. Consequently, you should still be able to get valid answers when designing the questionnaire, because it is impossible to control for any possible difference in learning speed, rate of forgetting, etc.

Best wishes and kind regards,

Rainer