If you’ve ever wondered how your child can spend hours on the computer, but only minutes on algebra, a newly released study may have the answer. It appears that those who are “chronically uninterested in achievement” are not operating out of a desire to do badly (or secretly put family members over the top), but may simply have different goals. Ones that involve FUN.

University of Illinois psychology professor Dolores Albarracín (photo), who conducted the “chronic achievement motivation” research with William Hart, of the University of Florida, discovered that those who value excellence and hard work generally do better than others on specific tasks when they are reminded of those values. But when a task is presented as fun, the same individuals often do worse than those who say they are less motivated to achieve.

For students, these findings suggest that how a teacher or parent encourages them to strive for excellence may spur on one person to try harder, while another could become less motivated.

“Those less motivated to achieve will excel on tasks seen as fun.”

The study, presented in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, suggests that those who are motivated to achieve will perform worse when achievement messages are combined with the concept of fun. The same cues, however, seem to enhance the desire – and ability – of people who lack achievement motivation. “It’s not that those with high achievement motivation always perform better,” Albarracín said. “You can also get the low achievement motivation folks to perform better than the highs when you present a task as enjoyable and fun.”

So, the next time you gear up to give your child a pep talk on good grades, keep in mind that people who are highly motivated to achieve differ dramatically from those who aren’t in their response to messages meant to inspire them to excel.

“The competitive mindset, the achievement mindset becomes a huge de-motivator for those who don’t necessarily value excellence as much as they value their well-being,” Albarracín said. “Perhaps the reason they don’t care to do well is because they want to do something else; they want to enjoy themselves – which is not a bad goal.”

“Students do much better when they believe that doing well is a function of hard work as opposed to innate talent.”

Why do some kids put forth little effort in school while others are motivated to achieve their personal best?

Over the past two decades, the main goal of Brainology, co-founded by Carols S. Dweck, Ph.D. and Lisa Sorich Blackwell, Ph.D., has been to discover what helps students achieve highly, and to apply the lessons learned toward improving motivation and achievement. Their research shows that developing a growth mindset — the core belief that abilities are malleable and not fixed — is critical to the adoption of learning-oriented behavior.

It turns out that beliefs and attitudes held by students have a strong influence on their achievement. In particular, students who believe that intelligence is something they can develop, engage in more effort-based strategies by working harder and spending more time on a subject as opposed to giving up.

Brainology research shows that students who embrace a growth mindset:

• believe their ability can be increased and value learning as a goal, even when it involves hard work or initial errors.
• feel that they have the ability, through their own efforts, to learn and master new material.
• identify difficulties as being due to lack of effort or inadequate strategy; not intelligence.

When students with a growth mindset have difficulty in a subject, they draw constructive, mastery-oriented conclusions and respond with positive, effort-based strategies. In one study, math students who believed their intelligence to be malleable performed better than equally able students who viewed their intelligence as fixed.

But how do students develop a growth mindset in the first place? The answer, at least in big part, is PRAISE. To determine the magnitude praise has on a child’s mindset, a group of researchers pulled fifth-graders out of class to take some simple puzzle tests. Following the test, each child received his or her score and was randomly given one line of praise for either intelligence (“You must be smart at this”) or effort (“You must have worked really hard”).

The students were then asked to choose a second test — another easy test similar to the first or a more challenging test where they would learn a lot. Of the children who were praised for effort, ninety percent chose the harder test while the majority who were praised for intelligence opted for the easy test.

The researchers continued the experiment by administering a third test far above the children’s grade level. As expected, the students performed poorly. However, those praised for effort on the original test tried various strategies to solve the puzzles and said they enjoyed the process. The students initially praised for intelligence were unhappy and assumed they just weren’t smart enough.

Following the artificial failure, the fifth graders were given an easy round of testing. On this final test, the students praised for effort improved their score by about 30 percent, whereas the “smart” group did worse by about 20 percent.

According to Dweck, “Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control. They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”

New York Magazine’s article, How to Talk to Your Kids, delves further into this fascinating study and relates the results to additional research in the field. It also talks about the positive achievement which occurred when a group of students were taught that, with learning, the cells of their brain develop new connections and existing connections become stronger. Details on this intervention can also be found on The Science page at Brainology.

For further reading on how to develop a growth mindset in your personal or professional life, visit Carol Dweck’s Mindset website.

“The most important thing parents and teachers need to do is to keep in mind the balance between what I call support and challenge. You need to constantly challenge kids. But you need to give them the support to meet those challenges,” he says.

Richard Lavoie’s book, The Motivation Breakthrough, outlines six motivational strategies:

Praise. Specific, sincere praise focused on effort and improvement is effective for most children, especially for those motivated by status, recognition or affiliation (a need to belong).

Power. Offering minor choices will help motivate power-driven, autonomous and aggressive children. Avoiding power struggles means figuring out how to give kids some power without ceding your own.

Projects. Using projects to connect different disciplines can stimulate and motivate an autonomous or inquisitive child.

People. Though all children need positive relationships, it’s especially important for adults to build positive relationships with people-oriented kids.

Prizes. Prizes hold huge appeal to children driven by status, recognition, affiliation or power. But because formal reward systems may divert attention from the actual task, Lavoie suggests intermittent rewards not announced ahead of time to celebrate best efforts.

Prestige. To some extent, all children need to feel important, but for autonomous, aggressive, status- or power-driven children, prestige and recognition are fundamental. Consistent encouragement and opportunities to showcase their talents are important.

The warning Lavoie gives about prizes matches what others have said. This is the reason we don’t use rewards systems at TeamUP! Tutors.

Some schools have an exhaustive list of specific majors — 443 in the case of Florida schools — mapping to particular jobs. These include fashion, agricultural machinery mechanics, ceramics, and health.

“This is a colossally bad idea,” says Debra Humphreys with The Association of American Colleges and Universities. “I think the motivation behind the program is to get students more engaged with their work, and that’s perfectly legitimate…. But businesses are telling us that the jobs that today’s ninth-graders will eventually have don’t even exist yet and that the specific training needed for technical professions is changing rapidly.”

On the other hand, Brighton High School in Massachusetts has five school-to-college-to-career pathways like law, health, and business and technology.

Dr. Humphreys lauds creating learning communities and broad career clusters like the program at Brighton.

And it is hard to argue with the results at Brighton:

Since the pathways were implemented in 1998, the school has seen an increase in the percentage of its students that pass a state-wide exam, from 10 percent to 75 percent. Two-thirds of Brighton students go on to two- or four-year colleges.

In some countries, declaring a major early is the norm. Do you think this is a good idea?

“More than 70 studies have found that the more you reward people for doing something, the more they lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward. It’s not just that rewards are ineffective over the long haul; it’s that they are actively counterproductive.”

“Rewards work in the short term, but at a great cost. Rewards, like punishments, are useful for getting exactly one thing: temporary compliance. By bribing or threatening kids, you can get them to do what you want as long as the reward or the punishment keeps coming. You’ll never get anything more substantial than that.”

Alfie Kohn continues, explaining how he approaches motivating kids:

“A lot of my work turns on the distinction between doing things to kids and working with kids. The only way to help kids become generous, responsible people and life-long learners is to work with them to solve problems and make decisions. But that takes time. It also takes care, skill, and in some cases, courage because we have to reconsider the validity of our requests. We need to begin by thinking hard about what we’re asking kids to do: Who benefits from our requests? Is there another way?”

Mr. Kohn’s book is on Amazon.

The article provides some tips avoid procrastinating:

• Precommitment. Force yourself to do what needs to be done, like Ulysses tying himself on the ship’s mast to get past the tempting songs of the Sirens.
• Do unpleasant work when you have the most energy, early and in the morning.
• Set attainable goals and do the work in steps.
• Unplug distractions, such as television and computers.
• The five-minute rule. Commit to doing the job for five minutes. At the end of five minutes, commit to another five minutes.
• Examine the reasons you procrastinate. Ask yourself what makes doing the work too difficult and why would it get easier with time.

For students who don’t see why they need to apply themselves in school, rewards can kick-start academic interests. But for students in general, experts discourage conditioning students to expect treats for school work.

So what can you do? The article gives these suggestions:

Celebrate hard work and improvement, not just grades.

Reward with special time. Acknowledge a child’s success with a family outing or activity. Recognizing a child’s effort afterward is different than offering an advance enticement, experts say.

Encourage children’s dreams. “After a certain age, the child will not ‘perform’ for parents and teachers unless they can see their own goals being met as well,” notes Anne Rambo, author of I Know My Child Can Do Better. “Your child should ideally perceive you as an ally, someone who wants to help him or her achieve goals.”

Find natural consequences. For example: Stop weeknight video-game time or friend visits until students can balance these activities with school work. Or have teens who don’t qualify for a good-student discount make up the difference with the regular insurance rate.

See how kids perceive rewards. A recent study found rewards worked more effectively for boys; teacher rewards, even more than parent rewards’, linked positively with boys’ academic goals and motivation. Girls received more rewards, but that wasn’t associated with higher motivation.