
How to Hack the Psychology of Student Motivation - da5e
http://calnewport.com/blog/2010/12/13/learning-to-love-your-ap-history-assignments-how-to-hack-the-psychology-of-student-motivation/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+StudyHacks+%28Study+Hacks%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher
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derefr
As a (recent) student, my problem has always been ego depletion/"lack of
willpower", not so much a lack of intrinsic motivation. In the times I could
be spending working, I feel too burnt out to do much other than watch TV/read
HN. Starting in on reading a new book would be an insurmountable task, let
alone doing productive work. And the worst thing is, I've never found anything
that will give me back my "mojo" except time. So, I wait, and sometimes I get
lucky and feel a burst of energy before the deadline long enough to start
(continuing once started is a lot easier, but no matter how little I tell
myself I need to do to get started, there's always a constant factor that
can't be subdivided.)

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.)

~~~
ctl
I've had the same kind of experience since I started college -- my life's had
the pattern of "work hard for several days, then recharge for several days,"
and the recharging days suck -- and although sleep and exercise help a bit I
haven't been able to substantially reduce the amount of time I need to bounce
back from the slumps. Until now, at least.

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.

~~~
dan00
"... and the recharging days suck ..."

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.

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joshrule
Newport makes a really interesting argument in this post. He practically
reduces motivation to getting started early on projects which you have a good
reason for doing.

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.

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hembegg
Conjecture: procrastination and addiction are codependent, thus curing
addiction cures procrastination. The cure for addiction is to do nothing for N
days, and thereafter ignore all thoughts about the addictive activity.

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nickpinkston
It seems like the author is making a similar mistake to "all extrinsic is bad"
by thinking that school must be of the form: "study hard for your AP history
exam".

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.

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mitjak
If grades don't work what does?

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.

~~~
derefr
Look at game design. School is the opposite of addictive or fun: it doesn't
have a tight feedback loop, you are indefinitely punished for initial mistakes
that could otherwise have been experiments, and doing badly has large
consequences (repeating/wasting tuition money.) School, ideally, would be a
completionist, not competitive, game: every correct question would give you an
experience point, and you'd _finish_ (not "pass") when you had (in however
much time you like) 100%-ed every question of every assignment of the course.

~~~
elai
Wow that really succinctly described the difference. I think a bit of the
reason why they do have deadlines is because people can put off not doing the
work at all forever unless you got some sort of whip cracker going. I did it
with a mathematics correspondence course. My linear algebra prof in the middle
of the course basically said that he realized that his main job is to be the
whip cracker to get people through this, more than learning per say, since
there are other methods of learning math too.

~~~
derefr
Well, if that's what people need, then we shouldn't be wasting the time of
tenured professors and grad students—who have much more interesting and
specialized things to do—by making them into whip-crackers. I think the ideal
"teacher" for a completionist education system would simply be someone who
could juggle the roles of motivational speaker, hard-ass, and Socratic. In
other words, although they would have their own particular skillset, they
_wouldn't need to know the material at all_.

 _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.

~~~
Radix
It's interesting for me to hear you describe this as I understand Texas is
trying something similar with a program called Avid. My best friend is
tutoring, er, facilitating for a smaller district. She tells me it's hard. You
have the normal issues of kids not listening (either some classes just go
"bad" or sophomore year causes kids to be especially...) but also have to deal
with the kids expecting a more normal student-teacher relationship becoming
frustrated that they aren't being given answers or being stubborn about how
their teacher did it differently. IIRC, the program is for kids who neither
parent has a degree so I wonder how much that plays into the difficulties of
the program.

~~~
derefr
The one thing missing from my description is the idea of a _role model_ —kids
need those, and schools shouldn't be where they get them. It used to be that
kids would first use their parents as role models, and then enter vocational
training, where they would have a _master_ as a role model.

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.

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ebzlo
I have a belief that if a professor assigned a 15 page paper on the first day
of class on the first chapter in a textbook, you wouldn't see too much a
difference than if you assigned it 6 weeks into the semester.

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known
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_syndrome>

