Services Academic Motivation
At Perspectives, we offer one-day workshops to help middle school, high school, and college students improve their academic motivation. The workshops are designed to give students the skills and confidence to handle their responsibilities more efficiently.
Facts About Academic Motivation
- Motivated students have higher achievement, a better understanding of curriculum, greater satisfaction with school, and lower dropout rates.
- Motivation affects all aspects of schooling including relationships with teachers and peers, help-seeking, and effort.
Motivation declines steadily from elementary to middle school to high school. - The consequences of lack of motivation are dire with 70% of students who dropped out of high school saying it was because they were unmotivated.
Research has shown that how students think about their abilities drastically affects how they approach school.
- Students who have a mastery orientation:
- Focus on the task rather than their ability.
- Enjoy the challenge of the task and have a positive mood.
- Generate solution-oriented strategies to problems.
- Often instruct themselves to pay attention, think carefully, etc.
- Students who have a helpless orientation:
- Focus on their perceived personal inadequacies.
- Attribute difficulties to a lack of ability.
- Generally have a negative mood (e.g., boredom, anxiety).
- Mastery- and helpless-oriented students do NOT differ in their actual abilities; the only difference is their perception of their abilities.
- Students who have a performance orientation:
- Are concerned with performance outcomes rather than the process.
- Interpret failure as a reflection of a lack of ability.
- To avoid falling, they do not try, cheat, procrastinate, make excuses, etc.
Academic motivation can be improved with the right strategies.
- Improving time management and organization can make completing tasks less cumbersome and reduce procrastination.
- Stress management and relaxation strategies can reduce worry about school and clear students’ minds to focus on their responsibilities.
- Cognitive-behavioral therapy can change students’ negative perceptions of themselves and their abilities and move them closer to having a mastery-orientation mindset.
The Academic Motivation workshops offered at Perspectives are designed to address the barriers which may be undermining their motivation and to give students new skills for managing their academic responsibilities. Call today for more information!
