Meeting Educational Objectives in the Affective and Cognitive Domains: Personal and Social Constructivist Perspectives on Enjoyment, Motivation and Learning Chemistry - Affective Dimensions in Chemistry Education - page 6

Fig. 1 Learners are said to
be able to experience ' flow '
when they are set
demanding learning
activities and have
sufficient skills to be
successful in meeting the
demands

and—when the match is optimal—they experience what has been termed flow

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(Csikszentmihalyi, 1997 ) which can occur when there is a high level of engagement
in an activity. In simplistic terms, this experience may be indicated when students
are disappointed when the end of the lesson arrives and cannot believe how quickly
the time has passed.
There are two important points to note about this model. Firstly,

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high and low

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are relative terms, and not absolutes. Secondly, whilst applying high levels of skills
to a demanding task can lead to a positive learning experience, this is not neces-
sarily going to be so. The learner has to feel the activity is worthwhile: there is
limited satisfaction in being able to do a difficult task well if it seems pointless.
Motivation is clearly an important consideration here. There are various theories
of motivation drawn upon in education (Kusurkar, Ten Cate, van Asperen, &
Croiset, 2011 ). However, it is common to distinguish intrinsic motivation, where
a person values an activity for its own sake (because it is enjoyed and related to
personal goals, e.g. because it is considered to support career goals), from extrinsic
motivation, where an activity is undertaken, for example, to avoid negatively
perceived external sanctions (Lavigne & Vallerand, 2010 ). In part, motivation
may depend upon initial interest in a topic, but there is clearly also potential for
considerable feedback effects due to a learner

' ' '

s subjective experience of learning
activities—the extent to which they offer a sense of challenge and whether the
learner considers he or she has been successful in meeting that challenge (see
Fig. 2 ).
Earlier in the chapter, it was suggested that constructivist teachers should seek to
offer an optimal level of guidance to learners, which can be understood as making
the task demand high enough to offer challenge, without becoming so difficult that
the learner perceives the chances of success as low and becomes demotivated. That
matches the set of conditions in which flow is said to be possible. In the remainder

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