Maintaining Motivation and Preventing First-Semester Burnout

Maintaining Motivation and Preventing First-Semester Burnout

Ryan Korstange Assistant Professor, University Studies Coordinator, UNIV 1010 and UNIV 2020

Middle Tennessee State University

Finding success in college can be complicated. During their first semester, students face a litany of challenges (some unexpected), including recognizing the structural differences between high school and college, understanding the hidden curriculum, and handling a different academic schedule and workload (Erickson, Peters, & Strommer, 2006; Smith, 2013). Moreover, learning in a postsecondary setting requires high-level and sustained effort over a semester (Dunlosky, Rawson, Marsh, Nathan, & Willingham, 2013). A central question, then, is, What can be done to motivate students to complete all the work required of them (curricular and cocurricular) in their first semester?

Students who enroll in the first-year seminar (FYS) at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU) have a one-year retention rate close to 75% (74.5% in 2016-2017; 76.5% in 2017- 2018), nearly matching the university rate as a whole, which was 74% in both 2016-2017 and 2017-2018. However, students who earned a grade of C, D, F, or W in our FYS have a one-year retention rate nearly 40 percentage points lower (37% in both 2016-2017 and 2017-2018). While retention depends on a variety of institutional, academic, and personal factors, these statistics indicate that students who do not complete the FYS with a grade of B or better are significantly less likely to be retained.

This article describes a curricular intervention used in two sections of MTSU’s first-year seminar. The modest goals of this intervention were to: (a) remind students of their initial goals for their time in college, (b) normalize conversation about college’s challenging aspects, (c) identify varied challenges that students face, and (d) allow them to dialogue about effective strategies they are using to moderate their burnout and maintain motivation effectively. The intervention took place within an 85-minute synchronous class session in the final third of the semester.

Instructional Design

The intervention itself has three phases: priming, categorization, and discussion. In the first phase (priming), because learning becomes more significant in authentic situations (Eyler, 2018), students are asked to explain their motivation for attending college, specific challenges they have experienced thus far, and strategies they have used for motivation. Students have five minutes to answer each of the following prompts on a 3x5 note card or Post-it note.

Card 1: Why are you at college?

Card 2: One specific challenge you face toward achieving your academic goals.

Card 3: Another specific challenge you face toward achieving your academic goals.

Card 4: A third specific challenge you face toward achieving your academic goals.

Card 5: One specific strategy you use to motivate yourself when things get hard.

Card 6: Another specific strategy you use to motivate yourself when things get hard.

For the second phase (categorization), class responses are initially sorted into three groups: (a) “Why are you here,” (b) challenges, and (c) motivation strategies. Next, the students analyze the macro-categories in groups. Each subgroup of students reads and categorizes the contributions in their assigned category by whatever structure they find in the responses. Once each group finishes classifying their assigned responses, they report to the class, summarizing the responses and justifying their categorizations.

The final phase is a collaborative discussion, connecting individual contributions from the priming phase and the categories that each subgroup identified. The discussion aims to help students reflect on their experiences and make meaning of them, with the goal of building on students’ expertise and helping them motivate one another.

The lesson concludes with a short, reflective writing assignment. Students write a fiveminute, informal essay on how they plan to apply one of the motivational strategies discussed in class to a specific challenge they are facing that semester. The students receive feedback on their assignment at the beginning of the next class session.

In Practice: Student Response Examples

Why are you here? When asked, about half the students said they were in college to get a job and another third said to get a degree, while just under a quarter mentioned personal growth or developing intelligence. Duckworth (2016) has demonstrated the value of gritty persistence to long-term goals. As such, a foundational strategy for helping students maintain motivation and avoid burnout is to help them remember these goals. Our in-class discussion (the intervention’s final phase) focused on the difficulty of being motivated by temporally distant goals (e.g., graduation, a job after college) and the related hardship of short-term motivation, particularly as the stress of the semester ramps up near finals.

Challenges: Students identified many challenges from throughout the semester, which they categorized into financial, personal, classes/workload, and professors. Financial challenges concerned the cost of college and the difficulty of balancing work and school. The cost of college (direct and indirect) is increasingly a barrier to successful learning (Goldrick-Rab, 2016), and it was evident that students who work have less time to devote to their studies. Further, overwhelmed and overloaded students experience burnout more readily. The in-class conversation focused on finding scholarships and grants and reviewed strategies for balancing work and school without burnout that were introduced previously in the course, with an emphasis on strategies that students found useful.

Personal challenges named by students included illness, homesickness, difficulty making friends or finding belonging, and family emergencies. The classes/workload category outlined the challenge of balancing the various requirements of college (e.g., social life, academic work, employment, involvement), along with problems staying awake for class and using technology (i.e., the LMS, online educational resources). Education often presents as an individual and exclusively intellectual pursuit, even though research consistently demonstrates the positive benefits of social belonging, both for learning and retention (Jorgenson, Farrell, Fudge, & Pritchard, 2018). There is no doubt that students who struggle to find their place or groups to belong to on campus are more likely to burn out than those who connect with the university community. The in-class conversation focused on ways of prioritizing personal wellness and finding social support.

Interestingly, many of the students viewed professors as a challenge to their success and learning. In particular, they identified complicated and boring lectures, the quick pace of instruction, unorganized class sessions, unclear communication, poorly defined expectations, overlapping workload, and the difficulty of learning in a seemingly insignificant class. While these students were clearly motivated to learn, they did not always know what was required or how to meet those requirements, and sometimes the work they were asked to complete served to demotivate them. Further, students struggled to maintain motivation when elements of the classroom experience did not meet their expectations, even if those expectations were not realistic or appropriate. Our in-class discussion focused on the self-directed nature of learning in college and the differences in teachers’ roles in college versus high school. We also discussed several ways in which productive struggle, a concept focusing on developing effective processes and resilient mindsets to persevere through challenging academic situations, contributes to deep, transferable learning (Warshauer, 2015).

Motivation strategies: Students identified several ways to self-motivate. Many talked about focusing on the end goal (e.g., graduation, graduate school, future job). Additionally, students noted the benefits of building momentum by starting with one small task or checking tasks off a to-do list. Many identified critical members of their support system who help motivate them (e.g., friends, parents, siblings, mentors), as well as the benefits of exercise breaks and listening to music. Finally, students talked about the value of rewarding themselves for completing a task (e.g., with free time, social interaction, retail therapy). The subsequent discussion focused on the mechanics of each strategy and aligning motivation strategies with the challenges identified previously.

Conclusion

From a programmatic perspective, information from first-year students on the challenges they faced is crucial to help continually refine our support of this group. The fact that so many saw professors as a challenge to their success is alarming and indicates that students and faculty’s expectations for the classroom learning experience do not necessarily align. Further, these findings highlight part of the difficulty of transitioning to college: Students must adapt their learning approach to meet college expectations. Because of power structures inherent to higher education, whatever adaptation is required is usually the students’ to make.

The success of this intervention from the students’ perspective is more difficult to ascertain. Course grades do not correlate well to one intervention, and retention and academic performance depend on several factors beyond motivation. Students enjoyed discussing their challenges, suggesting cathartic value. Further, students shared effective motivation strategies, many of which connected to research on motivation, thus providing an authentic place to discuss these theories. Finally, students came away with specific strategies for maintaining motivation in the final weeks of the semester. In the end, even if all this intervention showed students was that the first semester is hard and that someone—their FYS instructor—cares about their experiences, that is still a win.

References

Duckworth, A. (2016). Grit: The power of passion and perseverance. New York, NY: Scribner/ Simon & Schuster.

Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques: Promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4-58.

Erickson, B. L. S., Peters, C. B., & Strommer, D. W., (2006). Teaching first-year college students. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Eyler, J. R. (2018). How humans learn: The science and stories behind effective college teaching. Morgantown, WV: West Virginia University Press.

Goldrick-Rab, S. (2016). Paying the price: College costs, financial aid, and the betrayal of the American dream. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Jorgenson, D. A., Farrell, L. C., Fudge, J. L., & Pritchard, A. (2018, January). College connectedness: The student perspective. Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 18(1), 75-95.

Smith, B. (2013). Mentoring at-risk students through the hidden curriculum of higher education. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Warshauer, H. K. (2015, March). Strategies to support productive struggle. Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School, 20(7), 390-393. doi:10.5951/mathteacmiddscho.20.7.0390

Contact

Ryan Korstange ryan.korstange@mtsu.edu