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The environment can be used to focus a student's attention on what needs to be learned. Teachers who create warm and accepting, yet studious, atmospheres will promote persistent effort and favorable attitudes towards learning. Interesting visual aids, such as booklets, posters or practice equipment, motivate learners by capturing their attention and curiosity.

Incentives motivate learning. Incentives include privileges and receiving praise from the instructor. The instructor determines an incentive that is likely to motivate an individual at a particular time. In a general learning situation, self-motivation without incentives will not succeed. The use of incentives is based on the principles that learning occurs more effectively when the student experiences feelings of satisfaction.

Internal motivation is longer and more self-directive than is external motivation, which must be repeatedly reinforced by praise or concrete rewards. Students must find satisfaction in learning based on the understanding that the goals are useful to them, or based on the pure enjoyment of exploring new things. Some individuals-particularly children of certain ages-have little capacity for internal motivation and must be guided and reinforced constantly. Caution should be exercised in using external rewards when they are not absolutely necessary; their use may be followed by a decline in internal motivation.

Learning is most effective when an individual is ready to learn, that is, when one wants to know something. Sometimes the student's readiness to learn comes with time, and the instructor's role is to encourage its development. If a desired change in behavior is urgent, the instructor may need to supervise the student directly to ensure that the desired behavior occurs. If a student is not ready to learn, he or she may not be reliable in following instructions and therefore must be supervised and have the instructions repeated again and again.

Motivation is enhanced by the way in which instructional material is organized. In general, the best organized material makes the information meaningful to the individual. One method of organization includes relating new tasks to those already known. Other ways to relay meaning are to determine whether the persons being taught understand the final outcome desired, and instruct them to compare and contrast ideas.

Success is more predictably motivating than is failure. Ordinarily, people will choose activities of intermediate uncertainty rather than those that are difficult (little likelihood of success) or easy (high probability of success). For important goals, there is less tendency to choose difficult conditions. Having learners assist in defining goals increases the probability that they will understand them and want to reach them. However, students sometimes have unrealistic notions about what they can accomplish. To identify realistic goals, instructors must be skilled in assessing a student's readiness or a student's progress toward goals.

Because learning requires changes in belief and behavior, it normally produces a mild level of anxiety, which is useful in motivating the individual; however, severe anxiety is incapacitating. A high degree of stress is inherent in some educational situations. If anxiety is severe, the individual's perception of what is going on around them is limited. Instructors must be able to identify anxiety and understand its effect on learning. They also have a responsibility to avoid causing severe anxiety in learners by not setting ambiguous or unrealistically high goals for them.

It is important to help each student set goals and provide informative feedback regarding progress toward these goals. Setting a goal demonstrates an intention to achieve and activates learning from one day to the next. It also directs the student's activities toward the goal and offers an opportunity to experience success.

Both affiliation and approval are strong motivators. People seek others with whom to compare their abilities, opinions, and emotions. Affiliation can also result in reducing anxiety by the social acceptance and the mere presence of others. However, these motivators can also lead to conformity, competition and other behaviors that may be seen as negative.

Many behaviors result from a combination of motives. No grand theory of motivation exists; however, motivation is so necessary for learning that strategies should be planned to organize a continuous and interactive motivational dynamic for maximum effectiveness. The general principles of motivation are interrelated, and a single teaching action can use many of them simultaneously.