What Underachieving Middle School Students Believe Motivates them to Learn

Chapter 1: The Challenge to Educate Everyone Chapter 2: A Review of Literature Chapter 3: Methods Chapter 4: The Results Chapter 5: Discussion      An Emerging Theory      A Gap in Schools        Enough Teachers?        Not Far Enough        Missing Motivators        Risks      Getting in the Way?      A Final Thought References Appendixes Biography

The Risks Of Not Providing Motivation As long as teachers are teaching valuable content (perhaps as defined by state or national standards), why should educators be concerned about whether they tie into student interests or help them see the connections between what they are learning and their goals and futures? If one of the most widely accepted purposes for a public education is to prepare students for their futures and the world outside of school, it seems a travesty that students would perceive that their education has so little to do with that goal. Helping students find meaning in their learning brings opportunities to help students become highly motivated and excited about school. It breeds curiosity and inquiry, and engages learners. Not being able to find meaning in learning, on the other hand, deadens the curriculum, disengages students, and shuts down learning, undermining the goal to prepare students for their futures and the outside world. Part of the problem is "incidental learning," the attitudes, beliefs, and knowledge students develop through daily experience. Students do not learn only when teachers teach. Memory is working and processing all the time; students are learning all the time. But they aren’t just learning what is in the curriculum; they are observing what goes on around them and what activities are taking place in the classroom. They form enduring attitudes, likes and dislikes, which shape how they will approach learning and school in the future. Clearly the most desirable attitude to develop is the desire to go on learning. We should measure the success of our educational system by whether or not we are producing graduates who have internalized the ability and desire to learn. The best sign of a successful education system would be that students want to go to school, that they remain excited about learning once they get there, and that in the end, they are prepared to creatively respond to the kinds of open-ended problems they will actually face in the world. (Schank & Cleary 1995, p. 23) Many students, however, have been through too many courses where covering the content seemed to be more important than helping students become engaged by it. I am afraid that those students may have developed attitudes about school which act as barriers to future learning. For example, Mokros (1994) discusses how texts shape students’ perceptions of math into something that is noncreative, stuffy, formulaic, and filled with rules. "Their only search is a search for the right answer" (Mokros 1994). Previously, I described the attitudes of my own eighth grade Algebra students (Muir, 1994a). Despite the fact that these were the top students in the eighth grade, they didn’t think that schools had much to do with learning. They were bored and disenfranchised. They saw learning as something others did to them. They felt school was irrelevant and unimportant, and had somehow convinced themselves that they didn’t know much and didn’t have many strengths. These bright students’ attitudes illustrate how large the gap can become between what schools want students to learn and what they actually learn, especially when schools focus on covering the curriculum to the exclusion of what might motivate students. If natural learning grows from personal goals and interests, it is easy to see that some students may learn in spite of uninspiring teaching simply because either school itself matches their goals, or they happen to be interested in the subject taught. Many other students, however, see school as being much less relevant to their lives and are not so interested in what the teachers want them to learn. Jacobs (1989) comments that if educators are trying to devise a means of driving students out of school, they obviously are succeeding. Ellis and Fouts (1993) point out how Progressive educators worry about not making learning meaningful to more students: Progressives were opposed to the factory-like efficiency model on which schools depended (and still do). They decried the artificial learning derived from textbooks and written exams. They said that school learning was so unlike the real world that it has little or no meaning to the average child. Robert Hutchins, not a progressive, said it best: "Students resort to the extracurriculum because the curriculum is so stupid." (p. 152) Learning experiences are educative when and only when experience promotes continued growth and learning. Noneducative experiences can stop learning cold. The defining characteristic of any classroom activity becomes the question: does it set up conditions for further growth or does it shut off the person from occasions, stimuli, and opportunities for continued growth? What avail is it to win prescribed amounts of information about geography and history, to win ability to read and write, if in the process the individual loses his own soul: loses his appreciation of things worth while, of the values to which these things are relative; if he loses desire to apply what he has learned and, above all, loses the ability to extract meaning from his future experiences as they occur? (Dewey 1938, p. 49) Every experience educators provide students helps to shape their perceptions, as well as their knowledge base. The good news is that this can be a powerful positive influence. According to Dewey (1938), if an experience arouses curiosity, strengthens initiative, and sets up purposes that are sufficiently intense, then it can carry a person over the dead places in the future. This is why educators must attend to motivating students.

Web site created by Mike Muir Send questions or comments to wilder@somtel.com Last updated April 25, 2001

Mike Muir Assistant Professor of Education University of Maine at Farmington 104 Main Street Farmington, ME 04938 207.778.7179 wilder@somtel.com http://violet.umf.maine.edu/~mmuir