How to Hack the Psychology of Student Motivation
calnewport.com
calnewport.com
I seem to get this way more often in winter, so it seems like it could be something like Seasonal Affective Disorder (i.e. clinical depression), but I'm never depressed, just unable to convince myself to take any other path than the easiest one (e.g. fast food instead of home cooking, Short stories instead of novels, video games instead of hobby coding, organizing my computer rather than cleaning my house, etc.)
I have a feeling quite a lot of students could describe their problems with motivation in a similar way. It's not "I don't want to study right now, there's nothing fun about that," but rather "I can't study right now, because I am curled up in a ball of stress-avoidance." (If these students had an escapist crutch, like drinking to excess, this is when they would be doing it.)
At the end of this past summer I took a meditation course with dhamma.org, and three weeks ago I started meditating again. (I went on the retreat for unrelated reasons -- mostly I was thinking, "Ten days doing absolutely nothing, that's crazy, maybe something really amazing will happen to my brain" -- and when I finished it I was, at first, mildly disappointed with the results, so I didn't keep meditating.)
Anyway, meditation has had a really pronounced effect on my overall level of mental energy. I only have three weeks of data so I can't say decisively what it can and can't do, but an hour of meditation seems to cancel out a day or two of accumulated burnout. I'm starting to think that meditation could be literally life-changing on a large scale for me. (Incidentally, it's also unbelievably effective at eliminating stress. I'm actually much more certain of its efficacy as stress-reducer than as energy-replenisher.)
I definitely think you should try out a meditation course next time you have ten days free -- it could really do you some good.
They don't have to suck. It's mostly a perception of what you should be doing. It's sucks, because you think that you should be doing something, that it's not right doing nothing. It's a social issue.
I would point out that things like SAD (and deficiencies in general like vitamin D) are not necessarily binary or even discrete states where you either suffer it or don't; you can have it in lesser or greater amounts. It's the diagnosis which is discrete - don't confuse the map with the territory.
Although I'm not sure SAD is your problem, you may just have general issues with 'akrasia'. You may find useful or enjoy some of the articles in http://lesswrong.com/tag/akrasia/ (such as http://lesswrong.com/lw/f1/beware_trivial_inconveniences/ or http://lesswrong.com/lw/fu/share_your_antiakrasia_tricks/ ).
If it was random or constant, I would agree that that would be simple akrasia—but it's time-modulated, having long periods where I'm willing to attempt high-activation-cost tasks with no particular mental effort, and then long periods where considering such things seems all but impossible. The down periods are greater in the low-sunlight days of the year, whereas a bright blue summer sky can almost be guaranteed to put me in a somewhat manic state. But that's just a correlation, and I might be suffering from some combination of placebo effect and confirmation bias there ("ooh, blue sky, those make me work" -> production of dopamine resulting from that thought -> ability to work.)
That sounds a lot like depression to me. Depression isn't always sad or melancholy, sometimes it's just like you said.
Depression is a serious illness and shouldn't be equalized with an unmotivated mental state.
If you're then trying to explain people what a depression is, how it feels, then they associate it with their "depressed" days.
I have been suffering of depressions, and it's nothing like an unmotivated mental state. By equalizing it, you're trivializing depressions. They're real mental pain, they're about loosing any enjoyment.
This isn't really what I was talking about, though. It's more being unable to work for months at a time, barely managing to push oneself to scrape by, and then having months of easy, limitless energy. Neither period is predictable—I don't become any more akrasic when I do difficult or stressful work, and no amount of pronounced, conscious "relaxing" (avoiding all stressors, doing only fun things, etc.) will give me energy back any more quickly.
Everyone has ups and downs. Not everybody has a mood disorder.
Also, reducing the level of short-term pleasures for long-term ones really helps.
I don't personally enjoy a great range of activities. It's not depression or numbness but mostly carelessness caused by the lack of general meaning. So, when it comes to coding, it's mostly about working on something that frustrates me (or feel passionate about, the feeling is quite similar in my case) so I can reach a relaxed state again.
Happy, enjoyable are not exactly the words I'd use to describe my work. I feel stressed and anxious when I have a lot of undone things I actually care about, doing them is relaxing and when I'm done, using them or getting them out of my mind is satisfactory ;-)
It would be useful to read more about this on other websites.
About the 'getting started problem', there's the german term 'Handlungs- und Lageorientierung'. People with the personality trait 'Lageorientierung' are very focused on the current emotions. If they currently don't feel doing something, then they don't start doing it.
If you nevertheless of your feelings start doing something, and then feel the enjoyment, then the friction decreases, you're just doing it. You need the initial force to get started.
I certainly understand the 'good reason' part, but the 'getting started early' angle is a great insight. Picking off something small right away has a tendency of knocking even the most imposing projects down to size pretty quickly. Even if all I do is define the first thing I need to do, it leaves me with a sense of traction that often continues through the rest of the project.
Continued progress, however small, is one of the most powerful motivators I know. It may even be addictive.
I think a lot of the intrinsic stuff he talk about is more about getting rid of demotivational: exams, grades, etc. and focusing on finding something that the students really prefers to work on. I don't find this a pipe dream. If studying AP History isn't interesting, they're going to forget it in a year anyway. The valedictorian of my college class (of 8K people) was very good at taking tests, but had no critical thinking ability or interest in the world around her.
Why is it that 4 year olds ask "why?" questions about the world so frequently and by 8 most of them are reduced to: "Do this work, then play at recess". I think Ken Robinson's TED talk is completely correct in saying that we need to stop the standardized approach to education and let kids explore what they wish on their own terms. Sure - they'll probably need to be encouraged to do something at least productive (no playing games the whole day), but ALL KIDS are able to do this: whether its: language / computers / art / tech - whatever. They need to learn that learning is fun and rewarding.
If they want extrinsic motivation, have them think about their future life. Always remind them that this time is for finding out what being human is and preparing to live for their own happiness - not some societal groupthink.
I'm in an anthropology lecture where the professor who taught in the department for 35+ years is allowed to largely not believe in grades and basically dictate answers to students during the exam. I personally used the lectures as an introduction to a new to me topic, but a large number of students sign up for the lectures having found from their peers about an easy GPA booster. Some didn't listen to the lectures; many skipped it entirely.
This is actually the basic idea of an amazingly interesting book I read recently, _Good Video Games and Good Learning_ (http://www.amazon.com/Video-Learning-Literacies-Digital-Epis... and see also http://www.amazon.com/Video-Games-Learning-Literacy-Second/d...)
Lecturing would be left to professional speakers backed by a writing team and subject-matter experts, filmed remotely and either sold to schools as materials on the free market, or produced for the public by government media arms such as the BBC. If anyone had a question about the material that couldn't be answered by the lecture, the books, the rest of the class, by the "teacher"'s Socratic deduction, etc., the school would have tutors on-call as well (by remote from a tutoring group, or locally as a service of alumni.) There would be no segregated "classes" or "classrooms", but rather an integrated environment more akin to a combination library/study-hall, with gatherings for people working on the same class of problem at the same time, etc.
In fact, there wouldn't really be a need to "graduate" at all, or to "register" for specific semesters. As long as you could get a print-out at any time proving you had 100%-ed the problems relevant to the job you're applying for, that would be all you would need. You would be able to show up one day, leave for years, then come back and resume your studies as if you had never left. In fact, done this way, people would probably stop considering themselves to be "in school", but rather just say that they "go learning" in the same way one would "go hiking" or "go to yoga." A life-long hobby, in other words—just the way an education should be :)
Ah... but if only.
Right now, teachers act like role models for kids, but they're an intrinsically bad fit: kids want to see their role models doing the things they want to do, but teachers simply teach. Ideally, role models would be "visiting fellows", perhaps alumni, of a completionist school, psyching kids up about doing some thing or other such that they see school as a step toward doing that thing. Without that, school is meaningless, and it's no wonder kids aren't interested in it.
A lot of people feel the same way too about PhDs teaching, but universities are so huge they're like governments unto themselves full of traditions and factions and general bickering. I could really see value in the system you propose.
1. Grades need to be eliminated, but not evaluations. This teacher sounds misguided to me. The teacher needs to foster an environment that will generate curiosity and interest. The teacher needs to respect the students and their views through meeting regularly with them, listening to their ideas, goals, and dreams, and discuss it with them and provide feedback. Lastly the teacher needs to provide verbal and written evaluations on how each student is doing in their own journey in learning about anthropology.
Expecting students who know nothing about anthropology to all of a sudden be interested and fascinated by it and care by listening to a guy talk to them for an hour a few times a week is ridiculous.
2. An anthropology lecture should not exist at a level where most students don't care about anthropology. (Lecture courses for the most part shouldn't exist for general courses but that's a separate issue).
None of these things, in my opinion, have anything in particular to do with education. Education is an action you take (upon yourself) because of your goals; you're talking about the meta-process that causes you to set your goals in the first place, and to revise them as you go.
As an analogy, think of something every teenager is driven to do on their own: learn to drive. They will study, take the exam, study some more if they've failed, etc., because they have an actionable goal in mind (driving around, easily getting to friends' houses, etc.) and learning is a means to achieving this goal.
What students need are role models who can give them, and demonstrate to them, actionable goals. Some of the sciences make this easy—a paleontologist just has to point at a bone exhibit in a museum and say "kids, study and then you'll not only be finding these, but you'll know why it's important that we find them"—but every field can be reduced in a similar way with a clear, big-picture-focused mind (except maybe mathematics: that's pure blue-sky fun that only gets purposed after-the-fact.)
This is sort of the difference between unit tests, and integration tests based on user stories. Your role models should be giving you goals—stories for you to complete—and also evaluating how close you are to reaching them. You should be giving yourself tasks, which you can implement through education, and which can then be algorithmically verified as complete (by the school), with regressions caught and reinforced, etc. The tasks, when summed up, should give you something that meets the goal—if not, you need new/better/more tasks.
We're dealing with semantics here, however I disagree that education is mainly an action you take upon yourself. Ideally it would be, however we are far from that being a reality for the general population. Today one receives an education dictated (partly by you), however mostly by others (schools, universities). The specific action under your control is to learn. Learning can only be done by you (because of your goals), however supplying the means or environment to learning can be the job of someone else (to assist you in your learning process, assist you in your education).
> What students need are role models...
That's exactly what I was trying to say. I believe the teacher should act as the role model. An anthropologist who could inspire you and generate the curiosity and interest would be the ideal role model for a captivated future anthropology student.
That's how I felt about that professor. He's sparked interest in a new to me topic. As for the waste of money, I'm not certain how the university system works outside of Canada, but here at UToronto, after you've picked 3 or more courses, the fees for the term become flat, i.e. you can pick 4 or 7 courses, and the total is the same. I personally think taking 5 purely major related courses at a university with so many potential topics of interest to explore is complete madness, so the flat fee system works quite well, IMO.
Even if it ends up costing you more than you'd like, in case of a student loan exceeding $7,000 annually, the Canadian Government forgives anything above that amount, which is great if one is living alone and has to pay rent and bills.
Add to that all the possible term grants you can obtain, based on your marks, or in case of me, a low income, and it starts to make more sense to explore things a bit while at university.
While a bit off topic, I just wanted to justify taking seemingly unrelated courses for personal and not necessarily career related gain under the current education system.