Unlocking Students' Internal Drive for Learning

This week’s article summary is How to Unlock Students' Internal Drive for Learning.

 

Daniel Pink’s book Drive posits that three needs motivate adults in both their personal and professional lives: autonomy (the desire to direct our own lives), mastery (the dedication to improve in areas that matter to us), and purpose (the need to contribute to something bigger than ourselves).

In schools, student motivation is typically separated into intrinsic (from within) and extrinsic (from outside). While parents/teachers strive for their children/students to develop intrinsic motivation, we invariably resort to providing extrinsic incentives and punishments.

 

As the article explores, though, the problem with extrinsic motivators like grades, praise, and rewards is they don’t support children developing agency, self-confidence, and the fortitude to handle challenges and missteps, and too often even lead to loss of engagement and inquisitiveness—with the reward the goal, not the learning. At our Admissions Open Houses, prospective parents are surprised when I tell them that kids often lose interest in school as early as 3^rd grade when school becomes a chore to be endured rather than an unfolding adventure of discovery. 

 

When we provide a classroom and learning experiences that foster intrinsic motivation, our students, as the article says, work harder, learn more deeply, and voluntarily and eagerly take on tougher challenges (cue to our Program Pillars!). By giving more student voice and choice, by emphasizing the process as much as the final product of learning, by including student self-reflection, teachers help maintain student interest, support their agency development, and foster intrinsic motivation.

 

Realistically, extrinsic motivators won’t ever disappear: for parents and teachers sometimes they are easier and more convenient to use. Yet both parents and teachers need to make sure they’re providing opportunities that foster intrinsic motivation development.

Joe

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When Destiny Reyes started elementary school, she felt highly motivated. Like most young children, she liked learning new things, and she excelled at school. She got good grades and reveled in her success. She was at the top of her class, and she proved herself further by testing into a competitive, private middle school. But there it wasn’t as easy to be at the top of the class, and her excitement about school – and learning – subsided. Eventually, she says, nothing motivated her. She went to school because she had to.

 

Destiny, 18, is like most students in the United States. Surveys reveal a steady decline in student engagement throughout middle and high school, a trend that Gallup deemed the “school engagement cliff.” The most recent data found that 74% of fifth graders felt engaged, while the same was true of just 32% percent of high school juniors.

 

One of the key components of engagement is students’ excitement about what they learn. Yet most schools extinguish that excitement.

 

It all comes down to motivation. In many schools, students do their work because their teachers tell them to. For students like Destiny, getting a good grade and outshining their peers – not learning itself – becomes the goal of school. For other students, they need minimum grades to be on sports teams or participate in extracurricular activities or please their parents, and that becomes their motivation. Students who do their work because they’re genuinely interested in learning the material are few and far between.

But that’s exactly backwards.

Decades of research, both about educational best practice and the way the human brain works, say extrinsic motivators are dangerous. Offering students rewards for learning creates reliance on the reward. If they becomes less interesting to the student or disappear entirely, the motivation does, too. That’s what happened to Destiny in middle school when she no longer got the reward of being celebrated as the top of her class.

 

Inspiring students’ intrinsic motivation to learn is a more effective strategy to get and keep students interested. Students actually learn better when motivated this way. They put forth more effort, tackle more challenging tasks, and end up gaining a more profound understanding of the concepts they study.  

Still, Deborah Stipek, a Stanford University professor of education and author of the book “Motivation to Learn: From Theory to Practice,” is pragmatic about the role of extrinsic motivation.

The problem is that the balance, in most schools, is way off. While some schools around the country are trying to personalize learning and, in doing so, to tap into students’ interests, Stipek estimates that most teaching minimizes students’ internal desire to learn.

That’s not the case everywhere, though. Destiny’s trajectory of diminishing engagement took a turn in high school. Instead of getting increasingly uninterested and disconnected from school, she became more engaged. That’s because she enrolled in the Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center, a public high school district in Rhode Island. The Met is at the extreme when it comes to tapping into intrinsic motivation. Students don’t take traditional classes. They spend virtually all of their time learning independently, with support from advisors or at internships. Students all have individual learning plans and accumulate credits toward traditional subject areas through projects, self-directed study, internship experience and dual enrollment with local colleges. Almost everything they do, all day, connects to a personal goal or something they’re interested in.

Education researchers have been studying student motivation for decades, identifying the best classroom strategies to promote an intrinsic drive to learn. The Met puts many of them to use: Students learn through real-world, hands-on problem-solving:

• They tackle open-ended assignments that require sustained effort
• They get the power to choose what and how they learn
• They finish projects with something to show for their learning in portfolios and concrete products; they set their own academic goals
• They need never focus more on a grade than the process of learning because they don’t get traditional grades. 

All of these things come straight out of playbooks for inspiring intrinsic motivation. And the impact on students can be profound.

One challenge for schools trying to spark intrinsic motivation is to make sure that fun, engaging lessons also bring academic rigor. Several studies have found that projects and hands-on activities can be effective at intrinsically motivating students, but don’t actually result in substantive learning.

This comes down to teacher preparation and school design. Teachers aren’t trained to design academically rigorous lessons that motivate students in the right way. And schools aren’t set up to give teachers the time to do so. It is possible, though. 

And because it’s hard, it’s necessarily risky. Many teachers are afraid to experiment with this work. The accountability movement, where states hold schools to strict standards for student performance on standardized tests, put a damper on teaching methods that prioritize intrinsic motivation. Accountability is important but has prompted teachers to focus on test prep. That prioritizes the testing outcome – the grade – rather than the learning process, a surefire way to kill students’ sense of intrinsic motivation.

Researchers have found that one consequence of using grades to motivate students is that they stop challenging themselves for fear of trying something hard and failing at it.

Students don’t do particularly well on standardized tests at The Met. Rhode Island gives every school a star rating based on test scores, graduation rates and other metrics. The Met graduates more students than the state average (90 percent vs. 84 percent), but its rating, just two out of five stars, is dragged down by student achievement on state tests. School leaders, though, don’t pay much attention to test scores. They prefer to keep track of state survey data about student engagement, parent feedback about their children’s progress, student behavior, graduation rates and student performance in college courses.