Teaching Tip: Learning Depends on Will

Learning depends on will. Halfhearted learning, lackadaisical learning, learning without push and thrust, can never yield authentic results. For successful teaching it is absolutely essential to arouse and mobilize the will to learn. This is a point that every teacher should constantly keep in mind.

Numerous psychological experiments have shown that an aroused will to learn has a transforming effect on learning. Three of these experiments, all carried out a good many years ago, but still as fresh and significant as when first reported, are as follows.

In the first experiment, groups of adults, as far as possible equal in ability, were set to work on a variety of tasks. One group was especially motivated, chiefly by being told its own achievement as the learning went on. The other group had no special motivation. Both groups made the same number of repetitions, but the motivated group learned more in every case.

The second experiment dealt with the sending and receiving of the Morse code on a telegraph machine. Many of the subjects were novices, but some were telegraphers of long experience. All these experienced operators were mediocre. None of them had been able to come up to the main-line rate, and had resigned themselves to branch-line jobs, sometimes for as long as twenty years. During the experiment, which lasted only a few weeks, every one of these men improved to well over the main-line rate. The experimental conditions operated to mobilize energy and will, learning and improvement were achieved, and what had long been despaired of was now achieved.

The third experiment compared a group of college freshmen with a group of college seniors. The freshmen were put through a very strenuous ‘hell week’ for fraternity initiation, which thoroughly tired them out. At the end of all their tribulations they were given a formidable examination, lasting several hours, and it was intimated to them that their performance on the examination would affect their acceptability as fraternity pledges. A group of seniors took the same test at the same time. The seniors were fresh and rested. They were about three years older than the freshmen. They had much more experience in examination passing. But the strongly motivated, although exhausted freshmen beat the seniors.