Lots of readers of my entry on learning languages have said that the only reason I learned French well the second time (with the Assimil course) is that I was motivated. Here is one example: “Guy, the main reason that you learned French this time was because you wanted to learn it this time.”
Understanding the role of motivation in learning is important for designing productive learning environments — i.e. for learning well — so I would like to discuss it further.
Yes, motivation is important for learning! When I was in high school and training for the U.S. Physics Olympiad team, we heard (maybe apocryphal) stories about how our counterparts were being trained in the USSR: Candidates who didn’t make the cut got sent to the army. This kind of motivation, I thought, would definitely lead me to put in the needed hours.
To agree with the readers’ comments more strongly: For learning, motivation is necessary. However, there is a distinction between necessary and sufficient. Although motivation is necessary, it is not sufficient.
First I’ll give you an example from my own experience; then I’ll discuss a key research result from the study of expertise.
Myself, I’ve long tried to improve at chess. I learned the game from my mother when I was 3. My family tells of an uncle who had come to visit a few years later and was happy to find a 6-year-old keen on having a chess game. After I had won, I consoled him by saying, “If you want to win, you should play my dad.” One conclusion is that I was a little brat. The other is that I’d had lots of time to learn chess. And I was motivated. Sadly, at age 42, my chess skill is not much higher than when I was 6, despite lots of motivation and lots of practice.
Motivation does matter: We must want to learn. But the wanting is only part of a productive learning environment. We must also know how to learn — which I did not. That’s the key conclusion of the research on expert performance (an area of research discussed in this blog in the Q&A with David Shenk).
The how of learning is deliberate practice. For example, in school and college, to develop mathematics and science expertise, we must somehow think deeply about the problems and reflect on what did and did not work. One method comes from the physicist John Wheeler (the PhD advisor of Richard Feynman). Wheeler recommended that, after we solve any problem, we think of one sentence that we could tell our earlier self that would have “cracked” the problem. This kind of thinking turns each problem and its solution into an opportunity for reflection and for developing transferable reasoning tools.
Deliberate practice requires sustained concentration, and the rewards are subtle and apparent only in the long term. Thus, one needs motivation in order to enter into and sustain the hard work of deliberate practice. But the learning happens not simply through putting in the hours, but through doing so intelligently.
For chess, deliberate practice includes deep analysis of grandmaster games. You take an annotated grandmaster chess game — say, from Bobby Fisher’s My 60 Memorable Games — make the first few moves, then cover up the grandmaster analysis and try to figure out the move the grandmaster is about to make. If your candidate move matches the grandmaster move, great — move on to the next position in the game! If they do not match, try to figure out what the grandmaster understood that you did not. If you cannot figure it out, study the analysis in the annotations. Then repeat from step 1 with the next position.
This work is hard. But it is necessary. And it is productive. Canadian chessplayer Peter Biyiasas is said to have become an International Master by studying just two books, one of which was Fisher’s My 60 Memorable Games.
The power of deliberate practice is the message of the paper, “The Role of Deliberate Practice in Chess Expertise” (Applied Cognitive Psychology19:151—165 (2005)). Authors Neil Charness and co-workers studied the effect of different types of chess practice on chess rating. Hours of deliberate practice were a factor of 6 more effective than hours of regular practice (playing tournament games). No wonder I have hardly improved in 36 years. (And this factor of 6 comes after transforming the practice hours onto a logarithmic scale, which means that, in practice, deliberate practice is vastly more powerful than regular practice.)
So, do we need motivation to learn? Definitely. But alone it is insufficient. Deliberate (intelligent) practice plus motivation are together necessary and sufficient. Let’s design our learning environments so that they contain both.
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Mahajan completely misses the point… Sure you need a lot of things to learn, motivation, concentration, environment, etc etc. … but an incredibly important factor determining your ability to learn is genetic. For intellectual persuits like learning new languages and improving chess, IQ is probably the single most important factor which he didn’t mention at all. Not every kid can learn chess at age 3 even if Fisher or Kasporov try to teach them because they probably don’t have the intellectual firepower to follow!
Mahajan is just being plain glib here…
(Gladwell’s Outliers is quite misleading on a lot of issues; i’ll suggest anyone to follow Steven Pinkers review of Gladwell in nytimes and their subsequent exchanges where Gladwell starts resorting to ad hominems to argue his case.)
And yet IQ is increased by deliberate practise…(Dweck, 2000)
Sure, I agree but only to some extent. I read a little of what Dweck has to say on perceived theories of intelligence, but I doubt she would disagree with my above comment.
To a certain limit deliberate practice will help, but then there would a road block defined by your innate ability as measured by IQ (for adults for whom it doesn’t improve much). You can teach people things like chess or new languages but it would be a lot more difficult and time consuming for low IQ children or adults rather than high IQ. Deliberate practice will never make a below average or even average IQ kid/adult into a Gauss even if she puts 10,000 hours of “correct” practice (which i doubt she’ll be able to do in the first place, as she will most likely not be able to sustain motivation to continue because she will get stuck far too often on basic concepts). He/she will just get too frustrated after some time because she won’t be able to match pace with the high IQ kids working on similar stuff…
Mahajan should know that performance in certain pure mathematics courses like Topology, Abstract Algebra, Real and Complex analysis, Stochastic Processes are decided purely by IQ (accompanied with hard work of course… (it seems I am understating the value of hardwork here, but only to emphasize when hardwork becomes relevant. in reality hardwork is also critical in achieving greatness, but people miss the point when forgetting genetics just like Mahajan has done above!)). In fact, if anyone has been able to reach that level of sophistication in mathematics to take the above course their IQ has played a exceptionally big role in their reaching such a level (again i have deliberately left out ‘hardwork’)…
to summarize: you can’t work hard (subsitute it with in “deliberate practice” if you like) on something when you can’t even understand what/how to work hard on it !!
Here is an experiment if anyone wants to test what I have beein saying.
Go to a low ranked college where and gather the students who have attained the age of 18 (18 years is important because I think by then the genes have played their most important role by then)…
Then, 1) test their IQ; 2) randomly select students (low and high IQ withing the strata) and try to get them the most brilliant teacher you can find to teach them topology or real analysis … see what happens.
To save you the trouble, here’s what I am almost certain will happen:
before you can even think of teaching anyone what topology or real analysis mean, you will need to teach them a lot of “basic” maths like functions, calculus, and logic. You will realise that by the time you have taught them basic maths 1) all low IQ students have disappeared (this should include almost everyone at a low ranked college);
2) now if there is anyone remaining (you’ll see that the sample size will have shrunk greatly) and you have managed to teach them topology or real analysis, retake their IQ test and compare it with their scores on the initial test. If their IQ has improved considerably (i think it is very unlikely), what I said in my previous posts is essentially outright wrong!!
Working Memory is the best predictor to success, more so than IQ. See alloway.
Suggestions would be easy if there was research on motivation in the context of schooling alongside a real classroom setting with all variables that play into it. Psychologists almost never do those studies!
High IQs and useless “data” and “research” is not helping our education system. I fear ED Hirsch is the most articulate on this
Its all about enhancing our prepostions.
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You basically hit the nail on the head although you talk about delibrate practice you don’t give any solution on how to do it. Yes you have to have the motivation or fire to become great at something. Just as important is delibrate practice. How do you do this though? The way you do it is through a good coach and a good environment.
My daughter is a competitive swimmer and is ten. First le me say I doubt she will ever make the Olympics, but I have seen two sides of the coin. Her first team from age 6 until 9 was a pretty run of the mill swim team. It was quite crowded in the pool. The swimmer to coach ratio sucked. She got very little instruction. She now has been on a new team for 15 months. The improvement my daughter has made has just been crazy. She gets much more and better instruction. But that is only part of the story. The main part is the environment of her team. The team practices at 3 pools daily except Sunday. We happen to be at the smallest practice group and it turns out it is the best. See my daughter tries to improve to keep up with her peers. Then those swimmers see my daughter catching up so they strive to get better. It is your basically kids want to be better than others idea, but since the kids on the team are so good they push each other. There are just more good kids on the new team. But also important is the fact that the younger girls have someone to look up to on the team at practice. There are high school kids swimming at practice who are state champs and who have Olympic Trial cuts for the upcoming Summer Trials. The younger kids see the bigger kids are really good and they say well if they can do it then I can too.
So a kid can really want to be a great swimmer, but if he/she doesn’t have the tools to get there then the motivation won’t do it alone. So I agree with you, but you could have gone further.
I disagree, motivation, of the proper type is both necessary and sufficient. You can’t say that learning advanced Physics by being threatened to be enlisted is the same as learning advanced Physics because you love to have knowledge of Physics.
You’re talking about two different types of motiviation – internal motivation and external motivation. If you are internally motivated, then I think that is enough. If you are truly internally motivated, then you’ll do whatever you need to do to learn whatever you want to learn.
For the record, studying in school to get a better job because you’re pay is crap is not an example of internal motivation. You’re studying because your pay is crap and you want a better life. Internal motivation would be you’re studying because you are genuinely and enthusiastically interested in what you’re studying.
In the above example, either forms of motivation may be enough for some people, but I think that internally motivated people will succeed more often than externally motivated people.