In the summer of 2017, I along with my colleague founded an outside-of-school talent development program for middle school students studying in various schools in my hometown in India. We enroll children using various measures of intelligence, or through nominations from self, parents, or teachers. The program’s motto is to motivate intelligence for social change. Therefore, motivational development is central to our work. We have developed a prolonged (multi-year) intervention that focuses on the cognitive, emotional, social, and motivational development of learners. In this blog post, I describe how we approach motivational development in our program.
First, we use a variety of instructional approaches to reach our goals. We incorporate advanced content in our classes and focus on the development of personal and positive relationships among students and teachers. We ensure the classes are fun and self-disciplined and the teachers are easily approachable, friendly, and caring. Our program has two components: a year-long weekend-based program and a short residential summer program. Students attend both the components in any given year.
In the weekend component of our program, we include various class activities that involve direct instruction on motivational development. We use reading resolution and continuous reading encouragement as strategies to improve students’ reading performance. That is, we encourage students to set up a reading task, say 10 pages per day, and stick to it for a month. We have found statistically significant growth of large effect sizes in our students’ reading performance. In related efforts, our program includes a component dedicated to self-regulated learning in which we focus on the development of self-study skills, academic planning skills, and study habits.
In the residential summer camp component of the program, we invite role models aligning with program goals to interact with our students. We also include workshop-based sessions on topics such as leadership development. Through a rigorous yet enjoyable camp experience, students learn various psychosocial skills including social communication, resilience, gratitude, and more. We recently studied student accounts of camp experiences to examine if and how the camp contributed to students’ affective development—emotional, social, and motivational. Related to students’ motivational development, we found that students gathered a lot of inspiration and developed perseverance through the camp activities, especially through interactions with guest speakers (role models).
In summary, we believe that motivation is at the core of education, and educators should focus on students’ motivational development as much as they focus on their cognitive development and academic learning. We have found some of our strategies to be more effective than others, and we will continue to systematically study what works and what does not. We hope you can do the same to elevate the level of learning in your educational settings. Cheers to incorporating motivation in education! Cheers!
Suggested Reading:
Pintrich, P. R. (2003). A motivational science perspective on the role of student motivation in learning and teaching contexts. Journal of Educational Psychology, 95(4), 667–686. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.95.4.667
Aakash Chowkase 