Why are some (young) people more motivated to learn than others?

I share a message I sent to my wife as we explore what it would mean to become parents

Hey, it’s Harrison 👋 Welcome to my publication about creativity as a tool for personal and professional growth.

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Hey subscribers,

So here goes my first attempt to share some of the most interesting and valuable stuff I'm learning as I research education¹.

I'm currently exploring the question:

Why are some (young) people more motivated to learn than others?

I pretty quickly got put onto Richard Ryan's & Edward Deci's Self-Determination Theory (SDT) as this seems to be one of the most widely respected bodies of research on this topic. Ryan & Deci (R&D) are still alive and active in this area too. It seems like a good place to start.

A theory based on the natural world

Probably the most upstream thing to know about SDT is that R&D are humanistic in their scientific sympathies.

I haven't researched what humanism is in much depth yet, but in the context of SDT it's enough to know that R&D believe humans are inherently driven to grow, learn and thrive when their basic psychological needs are met.

Abraham Maslow was a humanist in this regard too, and R&D base a lot of their work on Maslow's.

A key premise of their humanist posture that is important for understanding SDT is that it is an organismic theory. Organismic means that R&D looked at the natural world first, at how organisms thrive (or perish), in order to glean any insights that might help them understand how humans thrive. Humans are organisms after all.

R&D found that organisms which thrive do two essential things well: (1) they differentiate and (2) they integrate.

Being good at differentiating means having a high degree of autonomy and competence to develop their own specialised abilities (think of the hummingbird and its wing speed that enables it to hover).

Being good at integrating means being able to form strong connections with other organisms and build relatedness to a community/group.

It goes without saying that organisms which perish fail to differentiate and/or integrate. In sum, this was their key finding from looking at nature: organismic success comes down to meeting three needs:

1. Autonomy (another word they use is "volition")

2. Competence (efficacy)

3. Relatedness (belonging)

This was R&D’s "deductive" finding; these three needs fell deductively out of their observations of the natural world.

R&D also found these same three needs fell "inductively" out of their many experiments and studies, which they conducted in workplaces, classrooms, and health centres around the world.

Wherever they looked, the happiest and most effective humans demonstrated high levels of autonomy, competence and relatedness.

Wherever these three needs were not being met, people tended to be less happy and less effective.

Now, the question is: Where does my question about motivation-to-learn fit in?

If people are happiest and most effective when they are highly autonomous and developing competence, I want to know how they muster the confidence, focus and energy to go out there into the world and be autonomous in the first place.

The route to autonomy and competence (and relatedness) is obviously not going to be the same for everyone. So, which routes are best? What is it that makes the biggest difference between students? And between adults too?

To understand this, we need to look at another key component of SDT, which R&D call the "Motivation Continuum."

The Motivation Continuum

The Motivation Continuum is a spectrum R&D use to plot peoples' answers to the question "why are you doing X task?"

On the far left of the spectrum there is pure coercion; people are doing the task because someone else is forcing them to do it.

At the other end of the spectrum is pure volition; people are doing the task because it is intrinsically valuable to them.

And between the two poles you have a number of different types of motivation. Let's take a look at them:

1. (Left end of spectrum) Coercion - People are doing the task because they are being forced to by others

2. Carrot and stick - People are doing the task because there is a reward associated with it

3. Interjections - This is a bit of a tricky concept to get my head around but essentially an "interject" is a term taken from psychoanalysis and it refers to an intrinsic motivation that is shaped, at least in part, by external forces. It's kind of like a cocktail of internal and external motives. An example would be the classic underdog story: People are doing the task because they want to prove themselves to doubters or compete with peers. The key thing about interjections is that, whilst they can be highly motivating, they are ego-based. This is important and I'll come back to it shortly

4. Identifications - People are doing the task because they see it as part of their identity. An example could be working in a soup kitchen. People may not enjoy the work but they do it because their values are rooted in it

5. (Right end of spectrum) Autonomy/pure volition - People are doing the task because they find it intrinsically valuable²

A few important notes about the Motivation Continuum:

• Remember that the highest levels of happiness and performance are found in people who have high autonomy—that is, motivations 4 and 5.

• But humans are messy, and in almost everything we do there is likely to be a mix of motivations at play.

• That said, the thing that R&D warn us of is when we find ourselves doing tasks driven solely by motivations 1, 2, or 3. To pick up my earlier thread about ego-based motivation, R&D make the point that if your only basis for doing something is to prove yourself or to compete with others, this is an "impoverished" form of motivation because it is easily undermined and not easily sustained³.

So where does this leave us?

If you asked me to define what I think the purpose of school is today, I'd say it's to nurture students' appetite for learning and to provide them with the resources for doing so.

Another way of saying that is that the purpose of school is to foster in students motivations 4 and 5. You want them to walk away with learning as part of their identity, and with the autonomy and competence to pursue their own passions.

But the primary and secondary schools I went to, which are basically the same kinds of schools that the great majority of students everywhere still attend today, feel worryingly geared towards motivations 1 and some of 3 only⁴. (1) They force students to learn a rigid curriculum in a set way. And (3) they pit them competitively against each other in tiered classes with standardised testing.

Why are some (young) people more motivated to learn than others? One answer seems to be that schools fail to nurture the right kinds of motivations in many people. By the time they leave school, far from having an appetite for learning, they have an aversion to it.

That's not new news to me. But the Motivation Continuum has given me a better understanding of how exactly schools are failing many people through a misunderstanding of the pros and cons of different motivation types.

What it can't give me is more detail on what's going on in the lives of kids with high levels of motivations 4 and 5.

I do have some speculations:

• Are they born with it? In one sense, we all are. All babies and toddlers are very autonomous in their curiosity and will to explore. School then beats it out of many people. And I suppose kids that emerge from school with most of their childhood autonomy intact could be deemed to have been "born with it." But maybe a more accurate term is "survivors."

• Did they grow up around adults, and spend time in peer groups, who demonstrated high levels of autonomy and competence AND the rewards that come with them? Almost undoubtedly yes. This one feels key.

• Did they get early, formative tastes of the happiness that flows uniquely from autonomous learning? and did this then reinforce more autonomous behaviour?

That last point is interesting. It's what the experimental and controversial Alpha School is testing right now. As the parent and writer of a brilliant review of the school put it, it takes time to taste the rewards of autonomy and competence. And maybe some kids get put off from doing the hard work involved because of immaturity and shortsightedness.

But if you can rope them into it with the carrot and the stick, before too long, it's possible they will have tasted the real honey of autonomous learning, which if R&D's research is to be believed, will be its own reward more powerful than any carrot.

Lots and lots more to explore here. And many new questions come up:

• How do you help (young) people to meet their needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness in their education?

• SDT is amazingly helpful and applicable to many areas of life. But it’s only a theory. Where does it fall down? What does it miss? Who does it exclude?

• What can parents and educators (and lifelong learners) do outside of formal education structures to promote healthy self-determination in their kids’ (and their own) learning?

• If you’re reading this, have you had any practical experiences with the ideas in SDT? If so I’d love to talk to you about it. Get in touch.

Look out for future posts on this topic as I write my way towards answers to these questions and more.

Thanks for reading.

Harrison 👨‍🎨

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Previous post

1. I’m researching education, and writing about what I learn to my wife, because we have decided it’s an important, urgent and fascinating subject to become more knowledge about—both for us as future parents and for us as lifelong learners. This post is pretty much exactly what I sent to my wife. And I’ve decided to share it here since it’s within the scope of my publication and some of you might find it valuable.

2. I think it’d be worthwhile to try to unpack what is meant by “intrinsic motivation.” Could it include play, for example?

3. When I read about ego-based motivations being easily undermined and not sustainable, I can’t help but think of the way in which spending time on social media (including Substack since it launched Notes) makes motivation 3 overshadow motivations 4 and 5, which were the original motivations that called me to write in the first place.

4. Since writing this I’ve heard from some teachers that there IS actually a lot of carrot-and-sticking going on in most classrooms (and that it’s never very effective, at least not for long), so I’ll need to rethink my claim that motivation 2 is absent from the typical school experience.