Do you believe yourself to be intrinsic or extrinsic? Perhaps you're wondering what either mean...

Before today I wasn't sure about these terms either but as a trainee teacher I soon had to become best buddies with these two words.

To put it simply, is how are you motivated? 

Being Intrinsic means that you can self-motivate, you are always willing to do things because of you're own mind and not because some one else is telling you to do so. Piaget, a famous theorist back in the past, state that in order to learn we ourselves must be active learners, so is this you?

Being Extrinsic is the opposite! Relying on outer and external sources to motivate you. Whether this be in a classroom situation i.e. the teacher states what you need to know, and you reply back with the desired response. Skinner suggests that people learn best where the learning is presented in an extrinsic way, in contract to Piagets thoughts! 

So what are you? It is possible to be both!

If you'd like some more knowledge, when teaching if you follow an Intrinsic path it means letting the pupil learn for themselves, otherwise known as the constructivist approach. Whereas an Extrinsic path, an example in the class room would be wanting the children to learn the phoneme "sh" and when asking the pupils to repeat what sound "sh" makes, the only thing you want them to say back is SH! This is otherwise known as the behaviourist approach. 

Ergo, incorporating the two; intrinsic and extrinsic together is normally classed as the social constructivist approach, whereas although the person may be learning on their own they are also guided by other who may also be learning as they go! It is kind of a bouncing off of each other approach! 

SO I hope you can learn something new about yourself, and apply this to somewhere in your life!