Do Students Care About Learning?

Abstract

With the help from a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, we identified 1,000 children who were in 6th, 8th, 10th, and 12th grades in 12 school districts from Orlando, Florida, to Long Beach, California, and everywhere in between. Nine years later, we are still following some of the participants as young adults, although a much smaller group of them.

Learning to enjoy the intrinsic rewards of hard work is essential to successful human development, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of Becoming Adult: How Teenagers Prepare for the World of Work, tells us. Here he talks with Educational Leadership about how to help students seek out the challenging and engaging activities that will propel them on their way toward becoming productive adults.

Copyright statement, Republished from Educational Leadership, Do students care about learning: A Conversation with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi by Marge Scherer, vol. September 2002, vol 60.1, pp. 12–17 © 2002 by ASCD. Reprinted with permission