Why I can’t be assed to study for class

“Why am I learning this?”

“This is so boring.”

Sometimes school can be boring. Like, really boring. And that’s okay. Everything gets boring sometimes. Even your favourite activities get a little boring on occasion. But school can be extra boring. And it can be extra boring far too often.

How can we make school less boring? One way is to make lessons more interesting. We can see that when something is sufficiently stimulating, like a video game or a movie, people can focus intently for hours. However, these media are vastly different from schools. But do they have to be?

Schools can be fun. Learning can be incredibly rewarding and thrilling. But why are these games fun when most of the learning we do isn’t? Because schools have a mixed up idea of how to make something feel rewarding.

What makes something rewarding? Is it the prize you get after you do well? (seeing that A+ grade for your essay) Is it the relief of finishing something? Well, it can be both those things. But really reward is linked to your motivation.

Things are most rewarding when you want to be doing them. My roommate and I have been playing through a new game called Cuphead. We are just under 2/3rds of the way through this game. We’ve played 11/25 of the levels in the game, all of which take about 2–4 minutes to complete… if you don’t die.

By consulting this cheeky little pond we can see that my roommate and I have failed a combined 617 times trying to fight the bosses and beat the levels in this game. This means that on average my roommate and I each die about 28 times on a given level. Yet we both agree, as do many others, that this game is one of the most fun games of the year. How can something that gives us a hearty ass-whooping every time we play it be so much fun?

We want to beat it.

It is as simple as that. We want to beat it. And we will make mistakes until we can overcome the struggle and pull through. Overcoming that challenge is incredibly rewarding and makes us feel great. But the keyword is WANT.

Learning has to be inherently rewarding, or else why would organisms develop behaviours. In fact, we have neural circuits that make learning feel rewarding (dopamine, anyone?) (Schultz et al., 1997).

So why doesn’t school feel rewarding? I propose 3 major reasons.

Focus on extrinsic motivators

• When grades are involved, motivation shifts in various ways. It has been shown that grades make students prefer less challenging material (Harter, 1978). This is because grades make you focus on the destination, not the journey. This encourages you to take shortcuts instead of finding the work you are doing rewarding.

Ignoring student interest

• Not being able to choose what you do, or how you do it has been shown to lower intrinsic motivation (Ryan & Weinstein, 2009) How are you supposed to feel good about playing a game the way someone else wants you to play it?

Focus on results rather than progress

• High stakes testing makes school seem like a means to an end. Feedback is something that needs to be tailored to progress, not rigid and calendar defined. This is important to understand as too much feedback can be a nuisance and not enough feedback makes it difficult to learn. Providing feedback based on task-performance and effort is far more effective (Lam et al., 2011)

There are many issues when it comes to making something rewarding and fun. It’s a very complex topic with many other factors. We need to focus on what we can do in our schools as a closed environment to make sure that we are motivating our students to succeed and make learning feel as rewarding as Cuphead.

REFERENCES

Harter, S. (1978). Pleasure Derived from Challenge and the Effects of Receiving Grades on Children’s Difficulty Level Choices. Child Development, 49(3), 788–799. doi:10.2307/1128249

Lam, C. F., DeRue, D. S., Karam, E. P., & Hollenbeck, J. R. (2011). The impact of feedback frequency on learning and task performance: Challenging the “more is better” assumption. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 116(2), 217–228. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2011.05.002

Pulfrey, C., Darnon, C., & Butera, F. (2013). Autonomy and task performance: Explaining the impact of grades on intrinsic motivation. Journal of Educational Psychology, 105(1), 39–57. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0029376

Ryan, R. M., & Weinstein, N. (2009). Undermining quality teaching and learning: A self-determination theory perspective on high-stakes testing. School Field, 7(2), 224–233. https://doi.org/10.1177/1477878509104327

Schultz, W., Dayan, P., & Montague, P. (1997). A Neural Substrate of Prediction and Reward. Science, 275(5306), 1593–1599. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.uleth.ca/stable/2893707