Teachers' Cognition Of Students' Motivation At Primary School In Mali

Having observed students'motivation, teachers found that students were loosing more and more interest and pleasure to learn in Mali schools. The aim of this study is to examine teachers'cognition on primary schools students'motivation.The absence of academic motivation can consequently impede effective teaching and the students' well-being. For the data collection, one questionnaire was self-made by reseacher. This survey includes one hundred primary school teachers (72 men and 28 women) in Malian primary schools. All the items have been responded by teachers from over 45 mixed schools. It should be noted that these teachers are from different grades. This step permits us to successfully collect the data which have been counted, analyzed and used to interpret the results. Next, some statistical analysis were used to interpret the differences between related groups, through the psychological tools of SPSS 14.00.It was found that teachers in Mali believed that there are both motivated and unmotivated students, which might be influenced by the following factors:lack of confidence in their ability, lack of confidence in their effort capacity, unappealing characteristics of the academic task, and lack of value placed on the task. They also found that students have motivation only in engaging in classroom activities and that their positive message to students reinforce more their motivation to accomplish the tasksGiven the relevance of the views of teachers, it remains to elucidate the following issues: firstly, what are the reasons for the lack of students' motivation in primary schools? secondly, what are the teachers' views on the motivation of these students? These issues are crucial questions that every teacher wants to answer in their daily tasks. To handle these problems, we have hypothesed that students lack motivation because they lack their self-confidence. In addition, we have interpreted their views in connection with the factors of this study, like students' engagement, ability beliefs, and effort beliefs, values placed on the task, the task characteristics and positive message. We will firstly define motivation in the broad sense, then the theory of self-determination of motivation and teachers opinions' on students' motivation in the following sections. It was hoped that this study could make a modest contribution on finding a way to motivate unmotivated students in the Malian primary schools. The implications for educational practice were also discussed.