Motivation

Estimated Time: 1 hour

In last week’s lesson, we explored the importance of self-directed learning. We emphasized the need for you to be at the center of the learning process and to be able to set learning goals, monitor learning progress, and evaluate learning outcomes. This week, we will dive into how your mind influences your ability to successfully accomplish these tasks.

It may be obvious that thinking and logic play an important role in self-directed learning, but how about emotions? What role do they have to play in your ability to learn? How do your emotions help you get the most out of your learning or how might they hold you back? The goal of this week’s lesson is to help you find answers to these questions and many more!

Discuss: Emotions When Learning

When you hit roadblocks like this (and there will be plenty of roadblocks in your learning!), you are likely to feel emotions like anger and frustration. These sorts of situations will possibly also affect your mood, your ability to concentrate, and how you interact with people around you. However, being able to understand and regulate your emotions will prevent you from wasting your time and energy and taking out your frustration in unproductive ways, and will instead help you to pause and think calmly so that you can resolve the issues with your code and achieve your ultimate goal. To help us unravel how to do this, let’s start by learning what emotions are, and how they influence our brains.

But how do emotions influence learning?

From this video, we learned that the quality of our learning is dependent on both our cognitive skills (how we think) and our emotional state (how we feel). In fact, our emotional state impacts our ability to leverage our cognitive skills to achieve learning goals. For example, emotions can have a positive or negative impact on our attention, motivation, effective employment of learning strategies, and ability to self-regulate.

Discuss: Impact of Emotions When Learning

From the video, we learned that negative emotions (e.g. anxiety, fear) tend to narrow our focus onto the threat. However, positive emotions (e.g. curiosity, joy, pride) broaden our thoughts and ideas, helping us to be more creative, improving our capacity to learn, and helping us bounce back from failure. Negative memories can lead to negative emotional responses like anxiety and frustration, which hinder our ability to learn when we are put in situations that elicit memories of the past experiences. As such, it is important that we learn how to recognize when these emotions occur (through self-awareness), and effectively manage them (through self-regulation). One thing to note is that sometimes negative emotions can be useful in learning, a small amount of anxiety can help us focus, which can be good for learning. However, if the anxiety is significant and frequent, it can distract us when we are trying to learn.

We used to think that if people did well, then they feel good…we now know that that was the wrong way around. Actually, if people feel good then that provides the fuel for them to do well.

Curiosity is regarded as a strong positive emotion that drives learning. When there is a genuine curiosity to grow, improve and discover, learning is much more fun than when learning is driven by the need to perform for other people, or just get a passing grade. Learners who possess curiosity are driven by an intrinsic motivation that often makes them go further and put in more effort than learners who just want to put in the bare minimum. A useful approach to developing curiosity is identifying how a given topic that you are learning is personally meaningful to you, and how it could help you achieve goals that are important to you.