PROMOTING CHILDREN’S LOVE OF LEARNING1
DEBORAH STIPEK
STANFORD UNIVERSITY
Most children enter school self-confident and eager learners. They are curious,
bursting with questions, excited about learning to read and write, and proud of their new
skills. Soon after children enter school, both self-confidence and enthusiasm for learning
erode. Many students begin to see themselves as lacking in intellectual promise and as a
consequence they develop low expectations for success. Learning is no longer viewed as fun,
something that has intrinsic value, but rather as a means to other ends, such as parent and
teacher approval, good grades, or being admitted to a university.
It is regrettable that children’s enthusiasm for learning declines with age. They spend
a great deal of their time in school and certainly we want them to enjoy their experience.
Research shows, moreover, that when people enjoy learning, they develop a deeper more
conceptual understanding of what they are learning. And people who are highly successful -especially those who are creative, who invent new ways of thinking or doing -- are passionate
about their work. If we want our children to be passionate learners, we need to understand
why so many begin school enthusiastic and come so quickly to see learning as something they
have to do rather than something they want to do.
Explaining the Decline
Research has revealed several shifts in the way children view school and learning
which contribute to these declines in motivation. First, children’s definition of success
changes after they enter school in a way that makes success more difficult to attain. Young
children define success in terms of achieving their own goals and the skills possess. If a young
child is asked how she knows she is smart (most will claim to be smart), she will tell you
about what she can do: “I can write my name,” “I can tie my shoes.” Although rates of
learning may vary, all children develop new skills, and consequently can feel successful and
smart. Failure is typically short-lived and inconsequential. When young children have
difficulty achieving a goal, they may feel frustrated, but they typically do not experience the
sense of shame that can accompany failure in older children. Usually they simply change the
goal to something they can achieve.
By the age of 7 or 8 years, children begin to compare themselves to peers. More and
more, success is defined as doing better than others or receiving rewards or recognition that
others don’t receive. The scarcer the reward, the more valuable it is; it is much more
The points and examples in this paper are elaborated on in a book for teachers and
administrators: Stipek, D. (2002). Motivation to learn: Integrating theory and practice (4th
edition). Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon. (This book has been translated into
Chinese.).
Recommendations for parents are found in: Stipek, D. & Seal, K. (2001). Motivated Minds:
Raising children who love learning. New York: Henry Holt. (also available in Chinese)
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satisfying to get the only good grade in the class than it is to get a good grade along with half
the class. Because not all children can be the best in the class, defining success in terms of
comparative performance guarantees that some children will have to fail and experience the
negative emotions associated with failure. Those who fail often become discouraged and
many give up; they believe that no amount of effort will ever lead to success, so why try?
Older children also develop a concept of ability that can undermine their effort in
school. Young children view ability as specific, unstable (it can improve), and is achieved by
practice and effort. As children get older many develop a concept of native ability that is
more like the notion of IQ--something that is general and relatively stable. People have more
or less of “it’ and it limits the effect of effort on performance on a broad array of dimensions.
If a student believes that he is low in intelligence, he is likely to conclude that no amount of
effort will pay off in situations in which success requires competing with others who he views
as more intelligent.
Children’s goals in school change in part as a consequence of the changes in the way
they define success and ability. Young children focus on mastering new skills, learning and
understanding new things -- on getting smart. Because they can all succeed in achieving their
goals they can all feel confident. School is enjoyable because they don’t need to be anxious
about failing. Older children are more focused on high scores and good grades, on looking
smart. These goals create anxiety for many, because not every student can be better than
most other students. School is not fun for students who fail often or for the high-performing
students who worry about losing their privileged status.
To be sure, I have simplified complex developmental changes and masked variations
among children and between cultures with regard to all of the changes described above.
There is evidence, for example, that Chinese students view academic performance as more
based on effort than do American students, who focus more on native ability. Some children
develop performance anxieties soon after they enter school, even before. Others never do.
But the pattern of changes I have described holds generally across many cultures and groups
of children, and it has enormous implications for students’ approach to learning.
Students’ approaches to learning, in turn, have implications for how much and how
well they learn, as well as how much they enjoy learning. If children are focused on
performing rather than learning and developing their skills, they endeavor to learn only what
is required. In the U.S. students often ask, “will we be tested on this”? If the answer is no,
their attention and effort declines. (I once gave my nephew a book for his birthday; he
politely thanked me and told me that he would read it next semester because he had already
completed the three required book reports for this semester.) Performance-oriented
students’ learning efforts are focused on getting the right answer or a good grade, not on
understanding deeply or thinking creatively. They avoid challenges if they fear that they may
not succeed, and some who fear or anticipate failure cheat.
Students who are not confident that they can succeed sometimes expend more effort
trying to avoid looking dumb than they do trying to get smart. They make excuses, “forget”
their homework, feign illness, or play the clown to distract attention from their lack of
understanding. In some cases they don’t try at all (or say they didn’t try) because failing after
significant effort is much clearer evidence of a lack of ability than is failing without really
trying. Many students who believe that one or the other is inevitable would rather be known
as lazy than as stupid.
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Learning under these conditions, I assure you, is not fun. As a consequence, students
need extrinsic incentives to get them to do schoolwork. A vicious cycle begins in the early
grades of school, in which children’s developing concerns about performance undermine their
enjoyment. Teachers and parents provide extrinsic reasons for working at school, which
students increasingly depend on for motivation. Soon, the natural enthusiasm for learning
that they came to school with is lost.
It doesn’t have to be this way. This decline in children’s self-confidence and
enthusiasm for learning is not inevitable. To a substantial degree we create it by the way we
organize schools, instruction, and evaluation. If we created it, we can un-create it. We can
design schools in which children seek to learn rather than to perform; endeavor to
understand, whether or not the material will be on a test; seek challenges because they offer
opportunities to learn, not just to help them compete for scarce college slots; take pleasure
in learning in school, develop intellectual passions, and seek learning opportunities out of
school and throughout their lives. In the next section I describe the qualities of schools and
instruction that research has shown support this positive orientation to learning.
Motivating Instruction
When adults reflect on their own learning experiences they are invariably able to
remember situations that were boring and unpleasant and others that were exciting and
engaging -- some that produced the counterproductive behaviors I describe above, and others
that promoted significant effort. Researchers have examined carefully the qualities of
learning contexts that foster the latter rather than the former. Below I summarize some of
the general principles of learning contexts that promote productive learning behavior and
enjoyment.
Choice
Adults and children alike enjoy activities more when they do them because they
choose to do them than when they are required to do them. I enjoy reading French novels
now much more than when I was assigned to read them in college. In some cases it is the very
same novel. The only difference is that in one case I chose to read it and in the other I had to
read it.
This principle creates a dilemma for teachers. Clearly they cannot begin a new class
by asking students what they would like to learn this year and plan instruction based on
students’ preferences. There is a body of knowledge that we believe is important for students
to master; there are classic texts we think they should read. But in my observations, most
teachers provide far less choice than they could. As a consequence, they undermine students’
enjoyment. We may need to determine for students the broad topics that they need to
master, the concepts they need to understand, the texts they need to read. But there are
many ways to provide students some autonomy, even within those constraints. Teachers do
not need to tell students what to do and how and when to do it every minute of the day.
In addition to making schoolwork less enjoyable, a highly structured program that
provides little choice also fails to teach students important decision making and planning
skills. Students need to learn to judge how long a task will take and what resources are
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required to complete it; they need to learn how to organize a task and when to adjust their
plans. They don’t learn these skills if they are told what to do at every step. I have seen the
consequences of overly structured instruction in my university classes. Many students have
trouble adjusting to the new autonomy they suddenly experience when they enter the
university. They have difficulty choosing topics papers that are manageable given their skill
levels and the amount of time they have and they don’t know how to plan and organize their
workload so that it is completed efficiently and on time. To develop these planning and
organizational skills that are needed in the university and in life, children need to have some
discretion in how they go about school tasks.
Teachers can offer students choices and opportunities to develop decision-making and
planning skills without compromising their curriculum goals. A trivial example comes from an
elementary school classroom I visited. The teacher complained to me that she had a hard
time getting students to complete their reading assignment. Every day they did exactly the
same thing; they read a story in a book of stories and wrote answers to the questions at the
end of the story. We created some very simple options which accomplished just as well the
teacher’s goals of ensuring that students read and understood the story and that they
practiced writing. We gave them a choice between rewriting the end of the story, writing
their own questions and exchanging them with a classmate, or doing what they usually do,
answering the questions in the book. For at least a day, this modest choice was sufficient in
engendering great interest in an otherwise pedestrian task.
Anther example is from the elementary school I directed at UCLA. The teacher wanted
all the students in her class to read the same set of books by the end of the school year. But
rather than having the whole class read one book that she chose, and then the next, she
allowed students to form book clubs, which chose the book they would read first and then
second, and so on. The book clubs met every few days to discuss the book they were reading
and chose from among various writing assignments related to the book that the teacher
planned. By the end of the year, every student had read exactly the same set of books. But by
being able to choose the classmates they worked with, the specific writing assignments they
completed (all of which served the same purpose), and the order of the books they read, they
experienced much more autonomy.
Some schools I have visited give homework on Monday which is all due at the end of
the week. A few students choose to get it all done early in the week; others divide it up in
equal portions and do a little each day; and still others (but not many) wait until the last
night to complete it all. It takes students a while to figure out how to manage the set of
tasks, but it gives them an opportunity to learn how to organize their work, and to find out
(sometimes the hard way) that they have to plan ahead.
Often students can have a fair amount of discretion in the topics they select for their
work. If the goal is for them to understand biography or sonnets, they should be able to select
from a set of alternatives examples. As long as a biography has met certain standards, there
is no reason why one student can’t read one about a ballet dancer and another about a race
car driver.
Teachers can make learning more interesting by allowing students to investigate their
own questions. In a science classroom I visited the teacher gave students background on what
the nervous system is, and then asked groups of students to decide what question about the
nervous system they wanted to investigate in detail. Some of the questions were not
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answerable, at least by 10-12 year-old children, so she had to help them frame appropriate
questions. The groups worked for several weeks, with guidance from the teacher, consulting
websites and books and emailing scientists to answer such questions as “what makes me
dream” and “how does my brain tell my hand to move?” They then wrote reports, which they
presented to the class. To be sure, the student-selected topics did not cover all of the
material in the curriculum. The teacher had to fill in the rest. But students’ energy and
enthusiasm for the intellectual discoveries they were making was palpable. Moreover, these
children learned how to plan and to collaborate on a complex task -- skills that will serve
them well in college and in life.
These are just a few examples of ways in which I have seen teachers use choice
productively to make academic tasks more enjoyable. I recommend that for every task being
planned, teachers ask themselves what they really need to require and where they can give
students options in what to do and how and when they do it. Giving up control is hard for
teachers, but the benefits are considerable, and with time and experience, children learn to
make wise choices and use their freedoms productively.
Personally Meaningful, Authentic Tasks
Giving students choices helps teachers achieve another motivational goal -- ensuring
that tasks have some meaning to students. Much of what we teach in school seems very
remote and disconnected from children’s everyday lives. Even if they may not understand
why it is important to understand and appreciate the value of biography or sonnets, allowing
them to choose from among a set of pre-selected books and poems at least gives them an
opportunity to read on a topic that interests them. Allowing them to research their own
questions makes the nervous system, or the solar system, or oceans, or history or
government, or any topic more interesting.
Another strategy for engaging students’ interest is connecting tasks to their everyday
lives. One teacher I observed taught measurement and scaling by having students make a map
of their own bedroom to scale, and then shrink or increase the size of the map. One
enterprising student included all of her furniture in her map, cut out pieces of paper
representing the furniture, and tested some furniture rearrangements by moving the pieces of
paper around on the map of her bedroom. Another student decided to create a map of his
whole house. The students had great fun with the task while they learned to employ some
basic mathematical concepts. Another teacher I observed taught students to compute
percentages, use spreadsheets, and create bar graphs by having students create graphs on
the computer that represented the results of a survey they did of their classmates’ favorite
ice cream flavors. I have seen several teachers teach percentages by having students compute
baseball statistics.
In the UCLA laboratory school, the 5-7 year olds learned about measurement and
numbers and shapes by designing a garden in teams. They had to decide how much space they
would give to peas, corn, potatoes, strawberries, flowers, etc. in a rectangle. When the
teams finished their designs, the children voted on their favorite one and the teacher
launched a science lesson; the class planted a garden following the selected design, and
observed closely what was needed to promote the growth of plants.
In another classroom students learned about the Vietnam war by interviewing their
fathers and uncles who had served. Grandparents can also serve as important resources for
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understanding history deeply and more personally. Original sources make learning more
authentic, and are much more available, now that we have the Internet. Learning about the
U.S. civil war or the settling of the west by perusing maps and reading diaries and letters, or
even an autobiography, is much more interesting than reading a textbook.
Clearly not every assignment can be made personally meaningful or authentic. But the
more the kinds of activities I describe above can be included in the instructional program, the
more engaged and enthusiastic children will be. Such activities take a lot of time to plan. I
highly encourage schools to document well the various activities that teachers developed
which successfully engaged students’ interest and were effective in teaching them important
skills. By doing this, all teachers in the school have a collection of projects they can draw
from, do they don’t have to create every activity on their own.
Intellectually Engaging Tasks
The examples above are motivating for another reason – they allow students to be
actively involved in the process of learning. Listening to a lecture and reading text are not as
enjoyable as engaging in discussion or debating, interviewing experts, looking something up
on the web, or creating a product. Inventing a formula to solve a mathematics problem and
doing a science experiment are more interesting than simply applying a formula to a set of
problems or observing the teacher conduct an experiment. A multiplication game using
playing cards is more fun than reciting the multiplication tables or filling out a grid. Analyzing
a story or comparing two poems is more interesting than answering factual questions about a
story or memorizing a poem. Moreover, students learn better, remember what they have
learned longer, and can use the knowledge and skills more flexibly and creatively in novel
situations when they are actively involved than when learning is more passive.
The effect on motivation of tasks that involve active participation can be dramatic. I
have seen students who usually seemed nearly comatose come alive when asked to enact an
historic scene they had read about. I have observed students who rarely raised their hands to
answer questions become energized and engaged in a debate about strategies for solving a
math problem. In a high-poverty neighborhood, I observed students who in other classes were
usually slumped inattentively in their chairs, compete to express their opinion about the
meaning of a scene in a Shakespeare play, in their English classroom where the teacher
encouraged them to express their own opinions. The difference was not in the material to be
mastered, but in the way in was taught, and particularly in how students were involved in the
learning process.
If the teacher is talking more than a third of the time, students are probably not being
invited to play an active role as much as they could or should. Children need to be invited to
be active learners. They need to be given roles and responsibilities that require active
participation. Active participation can create a little more noise than many teachers like, and
classrooms should never be chaotic, disorganized, or disrespectful. But when students are
actively involved and truly engaged, when they are doing a fair amount of the talking, the
volume usually goes up a little. It’s a small price to pay for the attendant increase in
enthusiasm.
When I visit classrooms I listen to the kinds of questions teachers ask as well as
whether it is the teacher who is asking all the questions. To some degree teachers need to ask
questions that they know the answers to, to check students’ understanding. But questions
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with “right answers” should be mixed with open-ended questions that ask students to go
beyond simply knowing or remembering. “Why” questions are more engaging than “what”
questions. Students should be invited to ask questions, offer opinions, share personal
observations and experiences, and engage in critical discussion. Instruction that begins with
speculations and questions that force students to confront contradictions and errors in their
thinking is likely to engage their curiosity: "Why is blood blue under your skin and red
outside?” “Why do people in Mexico speak Spanish?" “Why is it summer in Australia when it is
winter in Canada.
Projects that require sustained effort and investigation and result in a product are
intrinsically motivating because they provide an opportunity to experience pride in a tangible
accomplishment. Two examples are reports on topics (preferably that the student has some
choice in) that involve research using a variety of sources and some design or artwork and
experiments that require planning, manipulation of materials, observation, analysis, and
summarizing.
The learning of specific skills can be embedded in long-term projects. A class
newspaper, for example, provides students an opportunity to do math (to determine how
much it will cost to produce and how much they should charge for it), social studies (writing
on current political events), art (designing a logo and the layout), and tasks that develop
other practical skills (e.g., using the computer to do word processing and spread sheets).
Other examples of long-term projects that I have seen include developing a model city, a
class book of poems, and creating a small business (e.g, car washing, making and selling
cookies).
The “Just Right Challenge”
Students often prefer easy work because they are concerned about their performance
and easy work ensures success. But easy tasks are not interesting. The most engaging tasks
require real intellectual work and sufficient effort and persistence to give students a sense of
accomplishment when they are completed. The feeling of mastery and achievement that
comes with a hard-earned success can be exhilarating and motivating. This is the feeling that
explains why, when there is no reason to be concerned about performance, a child might
exclaim enthusiastically after solving a few problems, “give me a harder one.” The easy ones
don’t produce the sense of accomplishment and mastery that give so much pleasure.
Very hard tasks that require an inordinate amount of effort and persistence to
complete, or worse, that students don’t have the skills to do, are not enjoyable either,
especially in contexts in which students are concerned about their performance. They
produce a feeling of incompetence, which is sure to destroy any possibility of enjoyment.
In every classroom teachers confront students with a wide range of skills. Creating an
educational program that is appropriately challenging but manageable for every student is not
easy, but it is as important as it is difficult.
There are strategies teachers can use to ensure that the difficulty level is appropriate
for all students without having to create entirely different tasks. The difficulty level can be
varied, for example, by providing tasks that can be completed at different levels. The same
assignment--to write a book report, a poem, or a story--can be completed at different levels
of complexity. Differential expectations can be conveyed by guiding students' choices (e.g.,
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of the book selected to report on), and by focusing on different skills. Whereas one student
might be expected and rewarded for writing one good paragraph without any spelling or
grammatical errors, another may be urged to work on using stronger verbs or to make better
transitions between paragraphs.
Different skill levels can often be accommodated by differentiating the task only
slightly. Consider the task mentioned above of having students draw their bedrooms to scale.
Some students might be asked to do a second drawing that is half or double the size of the
original; others might be asked to expand or decrease the drawing by 1.3 or .7 --essentially
the same task, but the latter involving more difficult calculations. The same math problem
can also be approached in different ways by students who vary in skill level. For example,
some students may be able to solve a problem with only one strategy while others will use
several different strategies. Some students may analyze the symbolic meaning of a poem
while other students describe the visual images created. Students can also be encouraged to
set different goals for themselves. Thus, some students my endeavor to complete the
multiplication tables in 3 minutes, others will try to do the same task in 5 minutes.
Skill grouping within classrooms is controversial. Some teachers are reluctant to group
students because they worry that it stigmatizes those who are grouped in the “low” group.
There is also evidence that teachers often use less effective and less motivating instructional
strategies for students in the lower-skilled groups. Another problem is that students get stuck
in a low group; they aren’t given an opportunity to accelerate their skills and teachers don’t
recognize that they are ready to move on. If careful attention is given to avoiding these
problems, skill grouping can be an effective strategy for differentiating instruction. It needs
to be flexible, however, with students moving frequently among groups, and instruction in
any given domain should not be taught exclusively in skill-based groups. Students of varying
skill levels benefit from opportunities to collaborate and learn from each other.
Conveying that the Purpose is to Learn and Understand, not to Perform
Imagine a child mentioning to his parent after school that he had a science test that
day. The most likely response is, “how did you do?” Perhaps at some point the parent might
ask what the test was on, and may even ask questions or share information related to the
topic. But parents’ responses will most likely make it clear to the child that what matters
most is performance. Children learn very early that school is not about learning, it is about
performing—getting good scores, good grades, prizes, looking good on college applications.
Schooling is designed much more to credential, to differentiate the strong from the weak,
than it is to ensure that all children develop understanding or master skills, or to promote
creative and innovative thinking.
Focusing on performance takes the joy out of learning. The same topics that children
might have enjoyed learning about under different circumstances become drudgery in school.
Experimental studies have shown that minor modifications in the context of tasks affect the
way they are experienced by students. For example, if people are asked to read a text in
order to teach it to another, thus focusing their attention on understanding, they enjoy the
task more and actually master the text better than if they are asked to read the same text in
order to be tested on it. Studies have also shown that students who lack confidence in their
skills become particularly debilitated in educational contexts in which performance is
emphasized.
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Children’s enthusiasm for learning can be rekindled in part by reducing their attention
to performance and focusing it on learning and on improving their skills. Criteria for
evaluation are key. In most schools students’ grades are implicitly or explicitly based on their
performance compared to classmates. In addition to being discouraging for students who take
longer to master material than others, those who learn easily are sometimes rewarded with
good grades or high scores even when they exert little effort. In the elementary school at
UCLA we did not give grades to students. Instead, three times a year teachers provided
detailed summaries of the skills children had mastered and the skills they were still
developing. The goal was to focus their (and their parents’) attention on their own progress
mastering the curriculum, not on how they were doing relative to their classmates.
Evaluation that focuses on improvement and mastering skills and that provides specific
information that can be used to guide future efforts also focuses students’ attention on what
they need to do rather than how well they are doing. A mixture of “commendations and
recommendations” is good when giving feedback to students. The commendation calls their
attention to progress they have made and skills they have developed; the recommendation
gives them guidance for the next step.
Evaluating students on personal improvement or in terms of progress toward a
predetermined standard is preferable for both high- and low-achieving students. Highachieving students always have a higher standard of excellence to aspire to when the
objective is to surpass their own previous level of performance. Low-achieving students
benefit because success defined in terms of improvement or achieving a realistic standard is
attainable and effort should always have some payoff.
Teachers can also focus students’ attention on learning and mastery by creating a
classroom culture in which all children’s achievements are acknowledged or celebrated. I was
once in an elementary school classroom in which a severely dyslexic child shared with some of
his classmates that he had finished his first chapter book. (Chapter books in the U.S.
represent a major milestone in reading; the other students in the class had achieved this goal
long before, while this boy struggled with reading.) The students asked the teacher if they
could buy the book that he had read, all sign it, and give it to him as a gift that would remind
him of his achievement. This is clearly a classroom culture in which students honored
individual accomplishments at all levels.
Part of performing is getting the right answer. Every child knows that in school, right
answers are good and wrong answers are bad. But outside of school errors are considered a
natural part of learning a skill. No one would expect to make perfect serves when learning
how to play tennis or to bake a perfect soufflé on the first attempt. But in most classrooms
red checks next to answers are reasons for distress, and 100% at the top of a paper is cause
for celebration. In school, students worry about errors, even on assignments based on new
material.
Errors should be treated as a natural part of learning. I have seen teachers develop a
whole lesson around a child’s error in solving a math problem. By engaging students in
conversation about his strategy she used the error as a valuable learning tool. After the class
had worked together to analyze the problem, she asked how many had thought the student’s
approach was correct at first. Nearly half of the students in the class raised their hands,
demonstrating to me that she had created a social climate in which being wrong was no cause
for embarrassment; the goal was to understand, not to be right.
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Focusing children’s attention on learning rather than their performance compared to
others does not need to foster unrealistic aspirations. Children will learn soon enough that
university slots are limited and that everyone cannot aspire to intellectually demanding
professions. But the sorting process does not need to begin when they are five years old.
Testing does not need to dominate the culture of the classroom. And no student should feel
that his or her efforts to learn are any less valued or important than another student’s.
Motivating Classrooms
Teachers and administrators often refer to children as being motivated or
unmotivated. To be sure, students vary greatly when they enter a classroom in how confident
they are about their ability to learn, how much they care about learning or performing, the
kind of encouragement and resources they have in their families, and how much effort they
put into schoolwork. These dispositions, outside supports, and behavior affect substantially
how much and how well they learn.
But I have seen the same child behave dramatically different in two different
educational settings. I have been amazed many times by seeing a sullen, uninterested student
come alive and display real passion in a new learning context. When I examine the differences
in the contexts that produced the apathetic versus highly engaged behavior, I invariably find
that the engaging context had the qualities of instruction I have summarized here. My own
observations are supported by decades of research on student motivation.
The principles for instruction that can be derived for research evidence can be used to
guide the development of instruction and classroom climates that maintain or rekindle the
enthusiasm that most children have when they enter school. All of us have experienced the
joy of learning something new. We can make that an everyday occurrence for our children.
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