SHIWANGI SHARMA

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ASSIGNMENT 1: ISSUE PAPER

In this essay, I would like to analyse the ways in which I have successfully accomplished my

goal and the challenges I have faced during my high school. I intend to highlight the issues

occurred during the process of choosing psychology in my secondary school for my major. I

failed in psychology in Year 11 due to my bad health circumstances and lost my self -esteem.

I was totally distorted by my results and planned to drop school due to social pressure and

their ideologies of how can a girl can get fail. I struggled to start a new journey after getting

fail but was afraid of failing back then my mother and my teacher, they helped me to get back

on track.

My motivation for psychology was the combination of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. My

extrinsic motivation was my Year 12 psychology teacher, who is my greatest inspiration in

order to develop interest in psychology as I always wanted to get her approval and I also

wanted to do well in her subject. In addition to this, my mother supported me to choose my

dream and follow it even I failed once. On the other side, my intrinsic motivation was

triggered by the pleasure I started having by learning Psychology. McDevitt and Ormond

(2014) explain that both extrinsic and intrinsic motivation can spur children to acquire new

knowledge and skills and engage in productive behaviours. Another factor that contributed in

developing my interest in Psychology was my self -efficacy and need to feel competent

because I started having the sense of getting successful. As said by McDivett and

Ormond(2014) “ children are apt to choose and persist at activities for which they have high

self- efficacy to maintain and enhance their competence.”

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In Bronfenbrenner’s terms, there was a strong connection between my two microsystems

(Bronfenbrenner, 2005)- school and family. School encouraged me to achieve my goal and

my family who showed their faith in me and gave me the sense of “ I can do this”. A meta-

analysis examined parental involvement in schools and found larger effect for academic

achievement from 52 studies.[ CITATION Mat15 \l 16393 ]. The good relation between my micro

systems resulted in getting more serious about my mastery goal of acquiring new knowledge

in psychology. I was attending specialized psychological classes out of my self-determination

towards psychology. McDevitt and Ormond(2014) emphasize that children and adolescents

have mastery goals; they will engage in those activities that will help them learn and they will

also learn from their mistakes. My teacher played the role of linkage between my two Micro

systems , ie; School and family. Hence, she was the part of my Mesosystem. The

Mesosystem along with Microsystem has the most direct influence on the developing child,

“comprises the interrelation among two or more settings in which the developing person

actively participates’’[CITATION Ter10 \p 330 \l 16393 ]. She provided me a warm and

structured environment to learn and have enough autonomy in decision making that I started

having a sense of self-evaluation about my actions. Moreover, I started adopting her values

and internalizing the motivation to learn more. Such internalization of values is most likely to

occur if adults expose those values, McDevitt and Ormond(2014). While, I started

demonstrating that I was doing well in school, I started having pressure from Exo and Macro

systems because of high expectation from society. I was the one doing something different in

my community and stereotype related to academic in India is that medical, non-medical and

commerce are the only streams to choose in high school. They never considered humanities

as the subject. This pressure acted as external pressure for me and I felt socially disconnected.

Bronfenbrenner(1979) argues what happens between Exo and Macro systems can be as

influential to development as what happens within them. The societal pressure worked as
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challenges in my ecological system but with the help of Micro and Meso system I was able to

overcome those problems. Thus, the ecological systems analysis shows that Micro and Meso

system worked together to help me achieve my goal. Exo and Macro system also played a

crucial rule as it gave me eustress which was good for me because I feel like I need to break

social norms of not getting successful in humanities. Eustress is one of a person’s best assests

for achieving peak performance and managing minor crisis [CITATION NCE12 \p 52 \l 16393 ]

The strategies used by my teacher and my school helped me to stay motivated for my goal. I

reckon those strategies were really influential on me as I was a child with low self-esteem and

efficacy. Primarily my teacher focused on promoting intrinsic motivation rather than extrinsic

motivation. She used many strategies to develop intrinsic motivation such as trigging out

curiosity with new and intriguing objects. She offered me various studying material to learn

more. I found that, this was the best strategy she applied, she always use to give me set

guidelines for everything. For instance, soughting out priorities, time management and how

not to lose focus. Teachers and adults must often impose restrictions about how children

carry out their activities to enhance their abilities, McDevitt and Ormond(2014). In addition

to this, she always downplays the seriousness of failures and gave me opportunity to improve.

Furthermore, school offered various counselling services which were effective to deal with

the stress and cope up with failure. These strategies helped me to develop self-regulation and

I started making wise choices and control my personal actions and emotions in order to

achieve towards my goals such as eating healthy so I won’t fall sick and won’t miss school.

As stated by McDevitt and Ormond(2014) Children are more likely to engage in self-

regulating behaviours when they are intrinsically motivated to accomplish certain goals.
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In a nut shell, I would like to say this analysis was really helpful to develop my ecological

system(Refer to Apendix). It leads me to a journey where I was able to see how I developed

different abilities by myself and with the help of others. “Matryoshka” model of my life

played significant role in exploring the factors associated with my success and challenges in

opting psychology as my academic domain during my school years. Along with that, it made

me aware of how personal, school, peer and social groups can affect a child learning and

development. Overall, I ended up knowing the elements that effects the development and

how important is to look after a child interest and motivations from the beginning to develop

him.

Bibliography
Derksen, T. (2010). The Influence of ecological theory in child and youth care: A review of the
literature. 330.

Matthew k. Burns and Kristy Warmbold- Brann, Anne F. Zaslofsky. (2015). Ecological systems theory
in school psychology research. School Psychology Review, vol 44, pp.249-261.

NCERT. (2012). Chapter 3: Meeting life challanges. In NCERT, Psychology (pp. 51-52). Delhi: National
council of education research and training.

Ormond, T. M. (2013). Child development and Education. Harlow, United Kingdom: Pearson
Education Limited.

Bronfenbrenner, U. (1974). Developmental research, public policy, and the ecology of childhood.
Child Development, 45, 1–5
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Figure 1 Appendix