Samenvatting

The school has to deal with the problem of unmotivated learners and low results. The children are not motivated to learn, have unmotivated attitudes, and they show bad behavior during classes. They don’t do their homework, they don’t listen to the teacher and they are bullying each other during class. The children are from townships and have a unmotivated environment. The following research question was set by reference to the problem: “How can a teacher from the School X stimulate the autonomous motivation of children of grade Y from an unmotivated environment?”.
Literature has been studied and questionnaires administered to teachers and students to get an answer to this question. Also there are performed two lessons, the one lesson the children received free choices in the processing of the material, the other lesson they did not.
The research has shown that structure, autonomy support, and interaction improve the three psychological needs: competence, autonomy, and relatedness (Deci & Ryan, 2000). The experiment demonstrated that working with the direct instruction model provides structure and that giving the free choices in the processing of the material improved motivation and performance.