Abstract

This study deals with motivation as an overall concept, from a student perspective. It encompasses factors that could directly affect students and their positive or negative motivation, concepts such as relationships, communication, expectations and interactions and their importance to my informants.The study also discusses certain theories to show the different ways of defining motivation, specifically in relation to my informants and their and my conclusions. My ambition is to establish the importance of the concepts mentioned above, as well as perspective changes to the enhancement of the performance standards of a good teacher.The purpose of this work is to describe, understand and clarify the external and internal factors that affect motivation. In order to achieve this purpose, I chose to use a method of qualitative interviews with three students, with different backgrounds, schools and conditions but with a lack of motivation as a unifying characteristic. The research questions were as follows:

• What factors influence students' motivation?  
•  What impact do achievement targets have in relation to the pupils’ own motivation to learn?
• How important are teachers' expectations for the individual student's motivation?

Within this study sub-concepts such as importance of expectations, relationships, and significant others are, according to my analysis, of great importance. The result of my work has shown that role models, in schools, are of great importance, and the need for positive expectations from these role models are important. The need for positive and active participation from significant others is far greater than I had previously thought. The study also shows how a curriculum has little meaning if it is not considered from the perspective of both teachers and students.Keywords: motivation, relationship, dialog, expectation and interaction.