Motivation crises and crisis-mediated model of students' educational motivation formation

The article presents the pedagogical interpretation of the term "motivation crisis". Motivation crisis is considered as an internal dissonance resulting from a discrepancy between the students' level of knowledge and skills and the conditions of the educational environment. Motivation crisis makes students search for ways of overcoming the internal conflict. Motivation crisis possesses both positive and negative potentials. This means it can stimulate the development of educational motivation as well as decrease it. An empirical research allowed the author to determine crisis periods in the evolution of educational motivation of students of technical secondary professional educational institutions: adaptation crisis (the first term) connected with an unconscious choice of profession and adaptation problems; crisis of development of cognitive motives (the end of the second term - the third term) characterized by a reduction of influence of external stimuli and insufficient development of cognitive motives; crisis of professional choice (the fifth term - the sixth term, after the field internship) resulting from a discrepancy between students' expectations and the conditions of the professional life; crisis of substitution of educational motives by pragmatic motives (the seventh term) resulting from students' inaptitude to combine their work and study. The results of the research allowed the author to create a crisis-mediated concept model of students' educational motivation development. This model shows educational motivation development as a bilateral process including students' activity aimed at overcoming the difficulties of crises periods and pedagogical aid (actual and advanced). Actual pedagogical aid helps students to overcome the difficulties of an actual crisis period, and advanced pedagogical aid prepares them to solve the problem of the next stage of education. Pedagogical aid is organized according to the features of the determined crisis periods. Four stages referring to the four motivation crises of pedagogical work were determined: initial, intermediate, principal and final. The goals, tasks and methods of actual and advanced pedagogical aid were developed for each of these stages. The implementation of the proposed model creates favorable pedagogical conditions for phased transition from negative motivation and avoidance motives to combination of cognitive motives with motives of personal and professional self-improvement, social responsibility and cooperation. This transition occurs in the process of students' overcoming the difficulties of crisis periods and actual and advanced pedagogical support of this activity.

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