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The posting below looks at the challenges of motivating
the current generation of college undergraduates. It is by Ian Crone,
assistant dean of students and director of the Frick Center, and Kathy
MacKay, dean of students, both of Elmhurst College. The article is from
Peer Review, Winter 2007, Vol. 9, No. 1
http://www.aacu.org/peerreview/. Peer Review is a publication of the
Association of American Colleges and Universities [www.aacu.org/peerreview]
Copyright © 2007, all rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
Regards,
Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
With an early December wind chill topping out at eleven
degrees and the setting sun quickly fading behind the carillon of our
campus chapel, it may seem like a strange time to contemplate student
motivation on our small Midwestern campus of Elmhurst College. Yet, as we
observe the initiative, dedication, and persistence of the eight
undergraduate students who have spent the past three hours lining our
campus walkways with one thousand luminaries, we wonder why these students
are so dedicated and others are not. At a time in the academic year when
most students' motivation for learning and involvement has shifted from
inquisitive exploration to exhausted survival, the members of the Walk for
Hope steering committee are inspired by and dedicated to their task of
placing the paper bag luminaries, each sponsored by a community member to
raise money for the American Cancer Society. Are these students motivated
to raise money for a good cause or to surpass the amount last year's
steering committee raised? Perhaps it's the opportunity to do something
with their immediate group of friends or do something to invoke the pride
of their family? Little separates these students from today's average
undergraduate. Yet, at this moment they exhibit what seems an increasingly
scarce resource desperately sought by faculty and student affairs
administrators nationwide, a trait that fuels academic success,
engagement, and learning: student motivation.
Conversations with faculty and staff colleagues at small private and large
public institutions over the last several years have echoed themes of
frustration concerning the need to compete for students' time and
attention. Students appear to spend hours surfing Web sites, hanging out
in groups, and updating their Facebook sites. They compete for
multiple leadership positions from which they often fail to gain all they
could because few focus fully on their responsibilities. They forfeit
deeper engagement in academic research to earn minimum wage at a retail
store in a nearby mall.
Identifying Student Needs
Whether you believe the characteristics commonly attributed to the
Millennial Generation or not, it is clear that the manner in which
students are motivated to engage in higher education has been changing and
will continue to change rapidly. The priority students affix to their
education is too often usurped by increasingly demanding and
time-intensive life priorities such as work, family, or
emotional/psychological needs. Many members of this generation of students
continue to live in an age of convenience and consumption. A college
education has become commodified, understood as yet another acquisition to
be made rather than a process in which you engage. Yet, as the Association
of American Colleges and Universities describes in Greater Expectations (AAC&U
2002), students need to become intentional architects of their own
learning, actively setting goals, exploring, reflecting, and integrating
acquired knowledge and experiences into existing worldviews. In today's
environment of convenience and consumption, how can students be persuaded
to move beyond "commodity" thinking and fully engage both in and out of
the classroom in activities that enhance their learning? How can they be
inspired to become immersed in learning?
Elmhurst College is a small liberal arts college, but its student body
defies easy classification. Each fall, the college attracts a first-year
class of approximately five hundred, approximately three hundred transfer
students, and a number of adult students. Over 50 percent of students live
off campus and many work at least one job. Because very different reasons
underlie students' decision to enroll at Elmhurst, inspiring student
success and learning requires understanding motivation from a variety of
perspectives. In fact, when we discuss student motivation, what we are
really talking about is whether or not students have made educational
activities a true priority: whether they have chosen to fully invest their
time and energy in their college experience. Likewise, once students do
demonstrate motivation, we are interested in understanding this commitment
itself. How do they take initiative, apply effort, persist to overcome
obstacles, and, ideally, reflect on their accomplishment once they have
succeeded?
When we consider the motivation of undergraduates, it is important to
consider characteristics commonly attributed to this generation of
traditional-age students. Respecting the power of relationships is
critical to student motivation. Today's students appear to be the
recipients of a great deal of family involvement and attention, and it is
not unusual for the expectation of this involvement to continue after they
enroll in college. Many students continue to have regular, sometimes daily
contact with their parents, calling to provide updates or seek
consultation on even minor decisions. While partnering with students'
families, particularly the notoriously labeled "helicopter parents," may
invite a loss of student autonomy, we have found that strategic, carefully
crafted invitations that enlist limited parental support serve us well. We
have begun to provide a consistent message to families during the
admissions, advising, and orientation process, linking student success to
the appropriate use of time, and urging the family members to support
student initiative and responsibility in the process of learning. Families
are also frequently invited to help students overcome obstacles. We honor
the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act restriction on sharing
specific student information, but we enlist family members' help by
educating them about campus resources, such as our Learning Center and
Counseling Center, and we encourage them to talk to their children about
taking advantage of the services available. In both of these instances, we
employ the student's relationship with his or her family to help make
learning a priority.
Finally, we have, on more than one occasion, wondered if students transfer
the expectation of involvement with their parents to the college. Are they
expecting the same kind of support or parenting from faculty and staff?
Frequent communication and an engaged academic adviser or student
organization adviser are among the keys to maintaining student initiative
and effort.
Motivating Millennial Generation Students
We have also become aware that students increasingly seek someone to
provide structure, direction, and praise in a way previous generations of
students did not. Today's students often ask what to do before thinking
through their own plans. It seems they want things to be fixed or done so
they can move on to the next project. We have found that the most
successful advising style has been to ask questions that lead students to
formulate their own ideas. Whether in the classroom or in a leadership
experience outside of class, this use of inquiry forces students to make
the educational experience their own by requiring that they reflect on the
challenge at hand and develop a solution of their own. The energy
generated by these students' realization motivates them to take action
where providing the answer would not.
At Elmhurst and across the country, today's undergraduates are very
accustomed to group activity. We have seen a trend over the last few years
toward copresidents or leadership teams. Students still compete to be the
president of an organization or the editor of a publication, but it seems
they do not want to be alone with their responsibility. Our students are
generally very peer-network oriented, preferring to work and socialize in
groups. Capitalizing on this preference for group activity to promote
motivation is challenging, but not impossible.
One simple way to encourage greater motivation is to use a student's
relationship with the group to focus his or her attention. For example,
the student leaders in our Student Government Association (SGA) appear
significantly affected by the evaluations of their peers. Each semester,
staff advisers of SGA administer a standardized peer evaluation, asking
group members to rate their leaders' commitment, knowledge, and
performance. The results serve to provoke the leaders to apply effort to
improve and stimulate reflection about what they are learning from their
leadership experience. Ultimately, relational techniques that were
successful in increasing initiative for students from previous generations
must be even more personalized today.
Increasingly critical to student motivation is an informed perspective on
the diversity of students. For example, many campuses traditionally have
held overnight or weekend retreats as a way to get students away from the
day-to-day activities to begin to develop as a team and focus on their
group and responsibilities. However, for students who are not comfortable
staying away from home overnight for reasons involving disabilities or
cultural values, this may not be a viable option. Because of increasing
student diversity, it is critical for staff and faculty to know their
student population well enough to know what unique obstacles and
incentives may inspire or discourage motivation.
Many students come to Elmhurst accustomed to a frantic schedule of
academic, work, and cocurricular activities. Students often continue to
maintain these busy schedules in college, sometimes from dawn until well
after midnight, moving from class to student organization meetings to on-
or off-campus work. While these students' frenzied schedules may create
the impression that they are highly engaged in their college experience,
in fact some students have created a rigid compartmentalization of many
seemingly disconnected experiences. Rather than expend the time necessary
to encounter new ideas, reflect, and make connections with their existing
worldview, many of our students carefully budget the minimum amount of
time necessary to allow them to achieve the grades they desire while
fitting in as many other activities as they possibly can. As a result,
students sometimes end up overwhelmed when something in their schedules
shifts unexpectedly. But we can help students be more sensitive to how
they use their time, and in turn, help them use their time to immerse
themselves more fully in the experience of learning. For example, by
scheduling regular, brief one-on-one meetings with the student leaders, we
are able to compel them to stop and reflect, refocus, and connect. In this
sense, we hope that the disconnected parade of class, work, and
cocurricular activities can begin to dissolve into a more seamless
educational experience.
One generational characteristic we have observed in many students is a
significant achievement orientation. However, while students may want good
grades for graduate school admission, too often they may not want to focus
on learning what they need to be successful in graduate school. They may
have long list of honors, awards, and leadership positions in clubs
without understanding that what they have learned in their positions
(i.e., public speaking, critical thinking, or intercultural awareness) is
what will make them successful. If they cannot articulate what they
learned in the organizations listed on their resumes, they will not get
the jobs or have the skills the employer is expecting. One technique we've
found to be successful in provoking greater effort and reflection involves
a tool often used in the classroom-persistent inquiry. By asking
questions, we check students' assumptions and often provide them with
helpful information about getting a job.
Engagement through Experiential Opportunities
In our work with students such as those from the Walk for Hope steering
committee, we advance an educational, or developmental, agenda through the
use of experiential opportunities and education. Much like service
learning, experiential education allows for increased educational
outcomes. Experiential learning is particularly useful for this
generation, which exhibits a much higher sensitivity to issues related to
social justice and a marked desire to do good. It is not unusual for us to
be able to appeal to an individual student's philanthropic orientation to
inspire initiative. When we are able to help students see that a project
in which they are involved-such as planning a lecture on the impact of
fair-trade coffee-is achieving a greater good, they are much more inclined
to persist until the project is complete. We believe this is due in part
to this generation's response to 9/11 and tragedy they have seen during
their lifetime.
This generation of college students has been raised on interactive
technology and entertainment-style communication. We have been told by our
students that straight lectures or PowerPoint presentations rarely hold
their attention. Experiences that involve students and require them to
interact as a part of their own learning are more likely to maintain their
interest.
Finally, one timeless aspect of out-of-class education that can provoke a
great deal of initiative and encourage persistence is reality, and the
realistic dangers of failure. It is critical to help students understand
the realistic, albeit sometimes indirect, steps between the generally
comfortable routine of college life and the upsetting reality of failure,
whether it manifests itself in diminished prospects for employment,
disappointed family members, or a failure to raise as much money for a
philanthropy as the group the year before. By helping students see-perhaps
for the first time in their lives-that the work in which they are engaged
is meaningful work that is important for them to accomplish, we can help
students take the initiative, avoid failure, and learn.
In 1954, when Abraham Maslow attempted to organize human motivation in the
hierarchy of needs, Facebook was not an obstacle to self-actualization.
But just as the society challenges educators to think of innovative ways
to inspire students to take initiative and persist to success despite
their daily distractions, so too does it provide new avenues to promote
learning. While placing one thousand luminaries on a bone chilling night
may, at first, appear daunting, the persistence of these students
illustrates that student engagement is often the first step on the path to
student motivation.
Reference
Association of American Colleges and Universities. 2002. Greater
expectations: A new vision for learning as a nation goes to college.
Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities.
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