Framing Experienced Difficulty and Uncertainty to Boost Academic Motivation.

Abstract

In order for students to do well in school, they must take action to achieve their academic and career goals. Students may have the strategies necessary to succeed but may not enact them when the time is right because there is no cue that they should act now rather than later, and once they do act, their interpretation of experienced difficulty may derail efforts rather than encourage persistence. In three sets of experiments, I look at ways to frame experiences of un/certainty so that students see now is the time to work toward their academic goals, and ways to frame experiences of difficulty so that it is seen as implying that school success is an important goal. The first set of three experiments tested the prediction that feeling unsure about the path to one’s goals can be motivating if accompanied by the feeling that one has the skills needed to make progress toward one’s goals. Sense of un/certainty about the self and path were separately manipulated in college students. Feeling uncertain about one’s abilities reduced the salience of academic and career future identities, but feeling certain about those abilities did not motivate action unless combined with a sense of uncertainty about the path as well. This combination increased planned study hours and actual goal-focused action, working on a resume builder instead of playing games. In the second set of three experiments, I provided children in school an interpretation of difficulty as signaling task importance; these students subsequently generated more school-focused future identities and strategies to attain them, and performed better on standardized intelligence and writing tasks. Children provided no interpretation of difficulty or an interpretation of difficulty as signaling impossibility of task success did not differ from each other in performance. The final two experiments provided students an interpretation of difficulty and assigned them to conditions implying they experienced difficulty as importance relatively more than others or that they experienced difficulty as impossibility relatively less than others. These students viewed investment in academics as more identity-congruent, planned to study more, and invested more time on a difficult task.