How to Hack the Psychology of Student Motivation

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

by da5e • 16 years ago

71 37 16 years ago

calnewport.com

ebzlo• 16 years ago

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.

derefr7• 16 years ago

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.)

mitjak3• 16 years ago

Upvoting not necessarily because I think it relates to the topic at hand but because I always feel very similarly as well. Seems like exercise, proper nutrition, and doing studies at a library or outside of home where you are more likely to be inspired works. Of course, it's easier said than done..

gwern2• 16 years ago

> 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 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/ ).

derefr7• 16 years ago

I'll give you three guesses as to where I got the term "ego depletion" :)

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.)

ramidarigaz• 16 years ago

I get the same way. I've found that there's a huge boundary to getting started. I sit down and it seems like everything is in my way to getting started on a project. However, once I start writing code, it's not a problem. I did that all semester on my coding assignments. I'd dread them until about 2 weeks before they were due, then I'd sit down and start writing, and next thing I know it's 1AM and I'm almost done. Great feeling :)

peregrine• 16 years ago

You nailed exactly how I feel. Its like rolling a ball up a hill, sometimes I get to the top and it rolls down easily, most times the hill appears to be so insurmountable that I cannot even think to try. I start exercise, eating well, studying, being proactive but it slowly dies as soon as I start getting stressed. The rock gets heavier, the hill gets higher, and the cycle repeats.

ctl• 16 years ago

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.

dan006• 16 years ago

"... 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.

psyklic• 16 years ago

Does anyone know a name for the condition described by the parent post? (i.e. Getting started is the main problem; this sometimes makes complex tasks seem insurmountable or like you can't do them.)

It would be useful to read more about this on other websites.

dan006• 16 years ago

The parent post isn't only about the 'getting started problem'. It's about accepting your unproductive days without forcing you to try nevertheless.

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.

philwelch3• 16 years ago

"... 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.)"

That sounds a lot like depression to me. Depression isn't always sad or melancholy, sometimes it's just like you said.

dan006• 16 years ago

"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.

hbt• 16 years ago

I know the feeling and one thing that really helped me is doing things related to a higher goal/purpose. I'm not talking about some spiritual stuff or convincing yourself with bullshit. Just something to aspire to, something you respect and admire or maybe the man you'd like to become. This helps aligning your goals... (but school will always destroy that with meaningless assignments... my approach to school is different)

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 ;-)

mitjak3• 16 years ago

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.

derefr7• 16 years ago

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.

elai2• 16 years ago

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.

gwern2• 16 years ago

> Look at game design.

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...)

aik2• 16 years ago

2 things:

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).

derefr7• 16 years ago

> 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.

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.

joshrule• 16 years ago

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.

hembegg• 16 years ago

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.

known• 16 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_syndrome

nickpinkston• 16 years ago

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.

How to Hack the Psychology of Student Motivation

Related Stories