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Build the belief first, and the study strategy will hold
A teacher's guide to the ten things that decide whether a student's effort turns into learning.
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01 The reward
A reward can delete the interest that was already there
Extrinsic motivation is the obvious tool. Promise something, get the behaviour. It works, and it carries a cost the book names precisely: overjustification, the point at which getting rewarded kills the innate desire to perform the action.
Mark Lepper's experiment supplies the evidence. Children who already chose to draw with magic markers were split into three groups. One group was promised a good player award for drawing. One was handed a gift afterwards with no promise made in advance. One got nothing but the positive feedback all three received. Two weeks later the markers came back out. The promised group drew less, and what they drew had got worse.
The mechanism is a shift of attention. Once a reward is attached, the reward becomes the point and the action stops being one. A couple once told Lepper how well their incentives had worked on their son, until the evening he picked up a crystal glass in a restaurant and asked what he would get for not dropping it. He had learned the deal, not the behaviour.
Process praise keeps students focused, not on something called ability that they may or may not have and that magically creates success or failure, but on processes they can all engage in to learn.Carol Dweck, 2007
Praise the process, not the product and not the person. "You have put great effort into making this painting" is encouragement that does not compete with the activity. "What a wonderful painting" praises the object. "Your creativity is amazing" praises a trait the child will believe they have lost the next time they fail.
02 The first question
A student answers "why should I do this" in three separate ways
Task value is the incentive to engage in a piece of academic work. Piner takes it from expectancy-value theory and splits it three ways, because a student can hold one kind and none of the others.
Attainment value is identity. The task matters because it fits who the student believes they are. Utility value is direction. The task matters because it leads somewhere they want to reach. Intrinsic value is enjoyment. The task matters because doing it is good in itself. Young children are hard to reach through the first two, since aligning a task with a future goal is beyond them, which is why the interactive lesson is not a treat but the only channel open.
Value also travels between people. In a study of students from more than eighteen countries, parents' beliefs about the usefulness of science predicted their children's motivation and achievement. Utility value is catching. The teacher who visibly finds the subject useful has already started teaching it, and the one who answers "so that you can pass your Geography exam" has taught something else.
Ask a student what they want to be, then set one short-term goal and one long-term goal with them. Piner's rule is that no child is too young for this, and that "because everybody attends school" is not an acceptable answer to why they are there.
03 The chain
Believing you can do the work is not the same as believing the work pays
Control beliefs are the beliefs about what will help or block a behaviour. Piner sorts them by where on the causal chain each one sits, and the sorting matters because a student can hold one link and be missing the next.
Take passing an exam. "I could pass this exam" puts the belief on the person, and that is an agents-end belief. "I could attend the extra classes" puts it on the behaviour, and that is an agents-means belief, which is what self-efficacy means. "If I take the extra classes, I would pass" puts it on the connection between the two, and that is a means-end belief.
Self-efficacy is the one that best predicts what a student does next. On its own it goes nowhere. Believing you can attend the classes while doubting the classes will help is, in the book's words, counter-productive. Both links have to be present, and the adult can supply the missing one by naming the connection between what a child did and what followed.
...they are prerequisites for the planning, initiation, and regulation of goal-oriented actions and they are part of the self-concept, where they determine to a large extent feelings of self-esteem, causing such emotional states as pride, shame, and depression...August Flammer, 1995
When something goes well, say the cause out loud. The book's example: the good grade is owed to the extra classes that were attended, so keep that pattern. Children who hear adults credit luck and fate learn that outcomes are not theirs to move.
04 The level
Four sources fill self-efficacy, and praise decides what a bad mark means
Bandura's four sources are not equal. Mastery experience, actually succeeding at something, is the strongest by a distance. The other three are watching someone like you succeed, being told you can, and the mood and health you happen to be in.
That ordering is a practical instruction. Set work that is reachable but not too easy, so a student banks real successes instead of being told about hypothetical ones. In a study the book cites, second-graders whose writing was given appreciation and specific suggestions showed a sharp rise in writing self-efficacy afterwards. Piner adds a warning about the gifted student who was never told: without the evidence of success, ability alone produces imposter syndrome, not confidence.
Then comes the test. A poor mark arrives, and what the student makes of it was settled earlier by how they were praised. Praise aimed at the person makes ability feel fixed, so a bad result reads as a verdict. Praise aimed at the work makes ability feel movable, so a bad result reads as information. Piner's Peter decides he is bad at maths. Her John looks at the questions he got wrong and practises them.
...seeing people similar to oneself succeed by sustained effort raises observers' beliefs that they too possess the capabilities to master comparable activities to succeed.Albert Bandura, 1977
Credit ability and effort together. "Practicing this much has made you really good at this" does both at once. After a failure, use the book's own line: you have put in a good effort, but that might not have been adequate, so try putting in a little more.
05 The room and beyond it
The study environment has three layers and the one that matters most is invisible
Piner separates the study environment into physical, social and psychological, and orders them by how hard each is to change. Most of the attention goes to the easiest.
The physical layer is objects and settings. Seating that fits the child's size, lighting in the 5000K to 6500K range rather than fluorescents that flicker, cool colours, a desk kept clear. It is real and you can fix it in an afternoon. In one study of ninety-eight students on colour and memory, green and yellow drew the most positive responses. Red carried anxiety, because red is the colour of a marked paper.
The social layer is people. Whether a child can ask a question without being judged, whether feedback runs both ways, whether someone gives each student ten minutes one to one every week. The psychological layer is how a student feels about being a student at all, and the book is blunt that this is the hardest to move. Its tool is Seligman's PERMA model: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning and achievement.
Time is the other condition the book treats at length, and its advice there is unusual. It prescribes no single method. It names six working styles, the hopper, the hyper-focused, the cliffhanger, the big picture thinker, the perfectionist and the impulsive, then tells the teacher to work out which one is sitting in front of them and adapt. In its own words, no single time management technique can be called perfect.
Change one thing in each layer this week. Swap the lighting. Give one student ten minutes of undivided attention. Then ask a class to write down their own strengths, which is Seligman's engagement step and the cheapest way into the third layer.
06 The two memory strategies
Both memory strategies work by making the learner produce the answer
Rehearsal and elaboration are the book's two cognitive chapters, and the difference between them is one Piner states as a map. Retrieval practice walks the route you already have. Elaboration opens a second route in, from somewhere you already know.
Retrieval practice is not repetition. Reading a chapter twenty times is passive, and passive reading builds nothing. Closing the book and writing down what you can recall builds the pathway, and the pathway is what you retrieve on later. The book's own illustration: Mini memorised the directions to Maria's house and got lost, while Sarah had walked the route twice and arrived without a hitch.
Elaboration attaches the new thing to an old thing. Kate tells Joanna to find the ice cream place they visited last weekend and turn right. That is the same move as VIBGYOR, as the method of loci, as saying photosynthesis is how plants cook their food. Both strategies cost more effort than re-reading, and the book calls that desirable difficulty: the difficulty is what does the work.
Hence if you read a piece of text through twenty times, you will not learn it by heart so easily as if you read it ten times while attempting to recite it from time to time and consulting the text when your memory fails.Francis Bacon, quoted in chapter 8
Have students write one question at the top of a fresh page before the lesson starts, then take notes in a wide right column with their own questions in a narrow left one. That is the first of the Cornell method's four stages, and the point of naming four is that writing things down is only one of them.
07 The last chapter
Effort regulation is what runs after the interest is gone
Everything so far raises the odds. None of it covers the day the work is boring and the student does it anyway. That day is the final chapter, and it is the one that turns the rest into results.
Self-regulated learning means the student pushes instead of being pushed. Piner gives four strategies and they close into a loop. Set a goal specific enough to check, and modest enough to reach: after a failed maths paper the goal is seventy per cent, not a hundred. Monitor with a checklist or a log that asks why the mark moved. Talk yourself through the hard step, the way a small child talks through tying a shoelace. Then reinforce.
Reinforcement is where the book closes its own circle. The reward comes back, but the student chooses it and the student gives it. An extra hour of television, an evening out to play, an ice cream. Piner is explicit that adults should not hand over the gift themselves but prod the student towards supplying their own. A reward you set for yourself cannot compete with the work, because you own both ends of it.
The degree to which students are metacognitively, motivationally, and behaviorally active participants in their own learning process.Barry Zimmerman, 1986, on self-regulation
Give one student a self-monitoring sheet with two yes or no questions about today, such as whether they took notes in science and whether they marked the important lines. Add one open question from the book's log: what made this result happen. Then read the answers and write back.
08 The whole book
Value, belief, effort
Ten chapters answer three questions, and they answer them in order. A study strategy that arrives before its question has been answered does not stick.
Task value
Attainment, utility and intrinsic value. One of the three has to sit above zero, or the work gets done grudgingly and nothing is learned.
Control and efficacy
Believe you can do the behaviour, and believe the behaviour leads somewhere. Take away either link and the effort stops.
Practice and regulation
Retrieve and elaborate, then run the loop: a goal, a record, some self-talk, and a reward the student picks for themselves.
The book's closing promise is the smallest one in it. None of this is fixed. Nobody is born with control beliefs, self-concept keeps moving, and intrinsic motivation can still be built in a teenager. What an adult supplies is the order.
Adapted from The Learning Book: A Research-Based Guide for Teachers to Help Students Learn Better
Sheryll Piner · © 2022 DVFZ Training Consultancy Services · 31 cited sources in the source edition