It was very interesting that the assigned reading for the day was also about student motivation and its effect on learning. Listening to Dr. McGuire basically reinforced all those ideas. I have often times thought about how best to motivate my students in a General Biology class and the best I could do was to tell them to work harder in order to get better results. It was a revelation to me that there are these tested and highly effective strategies that can be used in a class room to such good effect. I am certainly going to use some of these methods including methods to build student confidence early in the semester, use strategies in the class to get them involved early, help them learn how to take good class notes etc. After attending the talk, I realized that there is a very fine line between challenging the students intellectually and affecting their confidence and motivation level. I realized that along with teaching biology, it is equally important to teach them about how to study biology; develop good study habits. I am also going to incorporate Bloom’s Taxonomy in my assessment methods and make the students aware of this as well. We all have some general ideas about how we have to remember and understand something before we begin to analyze and evaluate but we never take the time to actually discuss it in the class.I thought this was a great learning experience for myself and it will definitely reflect in my teaching in the future.