Staying Motivated in Your Studies: The Importance of a Positive Learning Attitude

Ms Chua Siew Beng

Human Resource Management Specialist, School of Business

The greatest discovery of any generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering
their attitudes of mind.
Albert Schweitzer
Faced with the demands of different courses and a myriad of readings, projects and
assessments, you often find yourself drained of energy and stressed out before the semester
is over and you may ask yourself: How can I stay motivated in my studies? The answer lies
in developing a positive attitude towards learning.
Making sense of education
It is important that you find time to reflect upon what an education means to you. What
makes an educated person? What do you expect to get out of your time spent the university?
Your answers would determine your approach to learning. If you take a passive approach
when studying, you are likely to be engaged in memorising and cramming information just to
do well in a course. In contrast, an active approach will see you taking initiative to seek
understanding so that your intellectual paradigm goes beyond paper chases: you think
critically, you are open to new knowledge, and you find pleasure in learning.
Motivation to learn
The meaning you ascribe to education will serve as your driving force (motivator) in learning.
Of course, from time to time depending on the situation, you may have other motives for
learning. To find out more about what motivates you, ask yourself the following questions:

Do I study solely for the purpose of getting a degree to advance my job/career

prospects?

Do I study to prove my capability through academic grades?

Do I study to satisfy my curiosity and learn new things?

Your answers to these questions would provide you with an indication of your purpose of
studying. With this knowledge, you can clarify your goals of learning and commit yourself to
taking steps to achieve them. To stay motivated requires intense commitment and energy:
you need to demonstrate steadfast determinationeven in the face of obstacles!
Attitude towards learning
Making sense of what an education means to you and understanding what motivates you in

learning involve assessing your preferences and making choices. As your choices are
influenced by your attitude towards learning, it is therefore important to adopt a positive
attitude to enable you to stay motivated towards your studies and respond favourably to your
learning experiences.
Just like motivation, a positive learning attitude is difficult to develop and maintain.
However, it is possible if you commit yourself to thinking and acting positively. For example,
maintaining a quality of openness would allow you to see things beyond your existing
paradigms, inspire you to celebrate the joys of learning, and most important of all, empower
you to take control of your learning.
Staying motivated in your studies requires a clear purpose and positive learning attitude. It
is a conscious choice that you have to make. By spending time to reflect upon what have
been discussed above, you can find a perspective to learning that would give you fulfilment
and pleasure in your learning experiences. The choice is yours.

References
1. Beatrice, J.A. (1995). Learning to Study through Critical Thinking. Ch. 1: College Learning.
Chicago: Irwin, pp. 325.
2. Carter, C.; Bishop, J.; & Kravits, S.L. (2002). Keys to Effective Learning (3rd ed.). Ch. 1:
Becoming a Lifelong Learner. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1620.

How a Bigger Purpose Can Motivate Students to Learn

By Ingfei Chen
A few years ago, psychologist David Yeager and his colleagues noticed something
interesting while interviewing high school students in the San Francisco Bay Area
about their hopes, dreams and life goals.
It was no surprise that students often said that making money, attaining fame or
pursuing a career that they enjoyed were important to them. But many of them also
spoke of additionally wanting to make a positive impact on their community or society
such as by becoming a doctor to take care of people, or a pastor who makes a
difference. Whats more, the teens with these pro-social types of goals tended to rate
their schoolwork as more personally meaningful.
Given this information, Yeager and his colleagues wanted to know: could such a bigger
sense of purpose that looks beyond ones own self-interests be a real and significant
inspiration for learning? They believe the answer is yes. And theyve devised a new
social psychology intervention to foster a purposeful learning mindset as another
way to motivate pupils to persevere in their studies. Yeager, now based at the
University of Texas (UT) at Austin, conducted the work in collaboration with UT

colleague Marlone Henderson, David Paunesku and Greg Walton of

Stanford, grit guru Angela Duckworth of the University of Pennsylvania, and others.
They recently explored purposeful learning in a series of four studiesand put their
intervention to the test against one of the banes of learning: boredom. Initial
promising results suggest the psychology strategy could encourage pupils to plug away
at homework or learning tasks that are challenging or tedious, yet necessary to getting
an education thatll help them reach their greater life goals.
Can Drudgery Be Eliminated from Learning?
The idea of drudgery in schoolwork is anathema to many progressive educators these
days. Game-based approaches to learning are far favored over drill-and-kill
exercises. And while an emphasis on fortifying students academic grit and selfdiscipline in their study habits has been explored in depth, its controversial. Along
with criticisms about deeper implications relating to race and poverty, some observers
say the buzz over grit neglects the need to make dull classroom lessons more
compelling to todays learners. As education author Alfie Kohn has written, not
everything is worth doing, let alone doing for extended periods, and not everyone who
works hard is pursuing something worthwhile.
If you think about it the right way, you can actually be motivated and you can find it interesting,
even if on the surface its not fun.
Its complicated, though. At Stanfords Project for Education Research that Scales,
Paunesku believes that teachers and educators should make learning more engaging
wherever possible. However, the reality is that schoolwork is often neither interesting
nor meaningful, he said at least, not in a way that students immediately get. Its
hard for students to understand why doing algebra, for example, really matters or why
itll help them or why it will make a difference in their life. Yet, he noted, such work is
often key in building basic skills and knowledge theyll need for a successful future.
With that in mind, Yeager and Paunesku designed an intervention that subtly guides
students to connect their academic efforts with pro-social long-term goals, to see
whether it might help inspire them to plow through assignments that are boring but
important.
As a baseline, the research team first investigated a mindset of self-transcendent
purposeful learning by surveying 1,364 low-income high-school seniors at 10 urban
public schools in California, Texas, Arkansas and New York. The teenagers sat down at
a computer and took an academic diligence task devised by Duckworth and Sidney
DMello of the University of Notre Dame. For a few minutes, the participants had the
choice of either doing lots of simple, tedious math subtraction problems, or watching
YouTube video clips or playing Tetris.
The students with a purposeful-learning attitude (who agreed with socially oriented
statements like I want to become an educated citizen that can contribute to society)
scored higher on measures of grit and self-control than classmates who only reported

self-oriented motives for learning such as wanting to get a good job or earn more
money. The purposeful learners were also less likely to succumb to the digital
distractions, answering more math problems on the diligence task and they were
more likely to be enrolled in college the following fall, the researchers found.
The Potential of a Purposeful Mindset
Next, a pilot experiment tested the sense-of-purpose intervention to see if it would
improve grades in math and science (two subjects often seen as uninteresting): The
researchers asked 338 ninth graders at a middle-class Bay Area high school to log
online for a 20- to 30-minute reading and writing exercise. The teenagers read a brief
article and specific quotes from other students, all conveying the message that many
adolescents work hard in school not just to gain knowledge for, say, pursuing a career
they like but also because they want to achieve something that matters for the
world.
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Study participants then wrote short testimonials to other, future students describing
how high school would help them become the kind of person they want to be or make
an impact on society. As one teen explained, I believe learning in school will give me
the rudimentary skills to survive in the world. Science will give me a good base for my
career in environmental engineering. I want to be able to solve our energy problems.
Another ninth grader wrote that having an education allows me to form wellsupported, well-thought opinions about the world. I will not be able to help anyone
without first going to school.
A few months later, at the end of the grading quarter, the researchers observed
positive effects from the intervention, most notably in the weakest students:
Underachieving pupils saw their low GPAs go up by 0.2 points. Thats a helpful
improvement, said UT Austins Henderson, because many pivotal educational
decisions hang in the balance based on a GPA cutoff. A few tenths of a point can make
or break a students acceptance into a program or a school, which could in turn affect
what type of job she ends up getting and ultimately, the salary she earns, Henderson
said.
GPA is really a better long-term predictor of not just educational outcomes but all
kinds of positive life outcomes, commented education researcher Camille Farrington
of the University of Chicago. A 0.2 point gain in GPA could bump a B to a B+ or a B+
to an A-, she noted, which is an important impact given how brief and relatively
inexpensive the sense-of-purpose treatment was. Many other education interventions
take a lot more time, energy and money, yet dont give any more of a bump than that,
she said.

How Does It Work?

As with other kinds of academic mindset strategies, the benefit from the sense-ofpurpose intervention almost seems like magic, Henderson said. But its not, (as
Yeager and Walton have previously elaborated). The research team ran two other
experiments (with college undergrads) that helped unpack how the intervention might
work: by motivating students to engage in deeper learning, and by bolstering selfcontrol in resisting tempting distractions from schoolwork (as measured again by
Duckworth and DMellos diligence test).
What a purposeful mindset does for students is that when they encounter challenges,
difficulty or things that could potentially be roadblocks to learning, it motivates them
to persist and barrel through, Henderson said. The psychology researchers dont
know how long the positive effects last, but they speculate that just a small shift in
students attitudes could spark a chain reaction of stronger academic performance
and confidence that builds upon itself and endures over time.
People are motivated by, they care about having meaning in their life.
Such a payoff can be hard to believe. After all, grownups have forever been telling
children any number of reasons why a good education is important for their future.
But heres the thing: The technique for nurturing a sense-of-purpose mentality is
designed so that the student owns that and kind of puts those pieces together in
their own heads, for themselves, Farrington noted. And that is a different thing than
your mom or your teacher telling you, its important to do this because blah, blah,
blah, blah.
Other, self-oriented goals such as making money or getting out of their parents house
didnt seem to inspire students as much as the self-transcendent goals did in the
studies. Thats worth noting, Farrington said, especially considering that youths from
low-income backgrounds are often exhorted to study hard so that they can get out of
their disadvantaged neighborhoods and go to college or find a good job. If the research
results are right, these kids may get more motivational mileage out of the goal of
making a meaningful contribution to the world. Thats consistent with what we know
in social psychology: that people are motivated by, they care about having meaning in
their life, she said.
The sense-of-purpose work is just in its beginning stages, Henderson said, with the
psychologists still tinkering to improve the intervention. They want to explore whether
the technique can reduce student cheating, and whether teachers can activate the
purposeful-learning mindset by writing simple, subtle and carefully tailored messages
of feedback on classwork, he said.
Finding Meaning in Schoolwork
The experiments with the new strategy beg the question of whether the researchers
are implicitly endorsing drill-and-kill-style learning. They arent, Paunesku is quick to
say. Hes all for project-based learning and other efforts to make school more relevant

and alluring for students. Yet, he added, it isnt practical or possible to render every
lesson or assignment in K-12 super fun and game-y for kids and even if it were,
doing so could be a disservice to them later. What would they do when they get to law
school and are faced with having to memorize long lists of laws? Or when they land a
job that calls for mastering information that no one has gamefied to make it exciting
to learn?
Students go to school not just to learn specific facts, he pointed out. Theyre learning
how to learn, how to practice self-discipline and motivate themselves through
frustrating roadblocks, and thus are preparing for adulthood. Thats important even if
it isnt always fascinating, he said. But having that bigger sense of purpose, that
personal mission of making a positive difference in the broader world, might help
students to find meaning in difficult or mundane schoolwork. If you think about it
the right way, you can actually be motivated and you can find it interesting, even if on
the surface its not fun, Paunesku said.