Using the ARCS Plan

According to Driscoll (2005), John Keller’s strategies “build upon the sources of motivation (p.333)” such as self-efficacy proposed by Bandura. Keller’s ARCS model (1987) focused on four aspects of motivation: Attention, Relevance, Confidence, and Satisfaction. Keller's theories stemmed from his research of behaviorism, cognitivism, and humanism.
I found Keller’s ideas to be very interesting, especially to me, because it was right on target to be something that is missing in my educational situation. Thinking of the teachers at my elementary school, we have been given Senteos, which compliment the Smartboard, to provide a testing tool to automatically grade students for immediate feedback. I find this very motivational for students, but it has lacked the impact needed. Motivating teachers to add one more thing to their plate to do is very hard. The resistance comes from the need to add graphics or models to the “tests” to make them interesting and to have more validity. I think a motivation might be to have a motivational speaker (A) that was onboard with the technology. Teachers need to see how this would save time in the long run and help students to see results immediately (R) and then allow the teachers time to explore the software with help available (C). Then administrators need to give teachers incentives for the amount of product they produce and share, such as early release days or in-service days off (S).
Students in my third grade classroom are very distractible, due to many external forces of their daily lives that is more pressing to them than their school work. I have considered ways to apply the ARCS model. Since I am in charge of the Social Studies plans at our grade level, I decided to focus there. First, I need to gain the students’ attention (A) through intrinsic motivational strategies. I use a “set” as a part of my learning plan. This is a question or statement to arouse curiosity. I realize that I was missing an essential part of the set’s purpose and that is varying the “attention getter.” As I assess the need for this, according to the ARCS model, I plan on bringing in artifacts from a time period, finding relevant quotations of the historical figures of the time, and getting historical experts to make presentations. For relevance (R) I plan to allow the students to choose projects or if they want to partner or be by themselves. For confidence (C), I will give them rubrics of each piece of the project as it unfolds to insure success. Then finally for satisfaction (S), I will let them choose between making a vodcast to share their product and/or sending them to present their final product to other classrooms.

Keller, J. M. (1987). Development and use of the ARCS model of motivational design. Journal of Instructional Development, 10(3), 2-10
Driscoll, M. P. (2005). Psychology of learning for instruction (3rd ed.). Boston: Pearson Education, Inc.