Personalizing Sample Databases With Facebook Information to Increase Intrinsic Motivation

摘要

Motivation is fundamental for students to achieve successful and complete learning. Motivation can be extrinsic, i.e., driven by external rewards, or intrinsic, i.e., driven by internal factors. Intrinsic motivation is the most effective and must be inspired by the task at hand. Here, a novel strategy is presented to increase intrinsic motivation toward activities requiring the use of sample data sets, by automatically extracting the student's social data from a social media network, to create a personalized sample data set. A tool was developed to access Facebook and create a database to be used in practical assignments on database queries. A user study (N=74) measured intrinsic motivation before and after the assignment in three different groups of first-year university students. Each group had to create a set of queries of similar difficulty, with each group using a different database. Intrinsic motivation was found to be significantly higher for the group using their own social media data than for the groups using social media data from an unknown person or a business. The approach presented here can be applied to other subjects, such as data mining, image processing, or statistics.