Motivation to Learn

"Motivation to Learn With and Without Structure" was researched and reported by Katherine Love, as the subject of her Master's Thesis in 2013. It's late, but I didn't know about it until recently. 🙂

The formal title is The Self-Actualization of Education: Factors that Affect Educational Motivation, and if you click that you can read (or download) the PDF.

Katherine was in school for some years, and then homeschooled (soon unschooled) for a few more, before she started university (earlier than she would have, had she stayed in school, I think).

The abstract of Katherine's thesis is:

Researchers have found that many students of public and private education seem to lack the fundamental motivation to learn they had as toddlers. Educators are starting to realize that teaching through students’ interests and letting them learn at their own pace produces the best results. This research tested the hypothesis that a student’s motivation to learn is influenced by the degree of structure in education with an inverse relationship. A survey was distributed via email to 107 homeschooler discussion lists where there is a wide variance in how much structure parents include with daily instruction. The parents who participated in this research study were drawn from the online homeschooling population in all inclusive, secular discussion/support groups. As predicted, motivation means were highest at the lower end of the degree of structure.

---

I quoted from another master's thesis a few months ago here: Enthusiasm for happenstance

photo by Gail Higgins

2005, 2006...

Now it's history (new research at the time), but I was reading through some of Vanessa Bertozzi's thesis from 2006, and saw a footnote was not leading to its destination. I found the article, so am bringing the link here.
https://www.salon.com/2005/10/03/unschool/
Here is an internet archive / wayback machine link in case salon.com rearranges itself again:Endless Summer, Sarah Karnasiewicz
The intro might have been written by the editor, and it's not great:

Unschooling is a radical branch of home-schooling where kids control what and when they learn -- free of teachers, schedules and tests. Unschoolers say it's intellectually empowering. Critics call it irresponsible.

"Kids control what and when they learn" doesn't make unschooling sense, but it's not easy to understand unschooling.

I was quoted in the article.

"When you buy a curriculum and set your kids down five days a week, except in the summer, all you're doing is playing school at home," says Sandra Dodd, a mother of three unschooled children from Albuquerque, N.M., and an outspoken unschooling advocate. "Most home-schoolers, especially Christian home-schoolers, believe that schools are too liberal and too lax," she explains. "On the other hand, unschoolers believe that schools are too inflexible. Our objections to school are 180 degrees apart from their objections. And so we are not only not on the same team, but school is actually closer to what they're doing than we are."

Vanessa Bertozzi did take the time to understand unchooling as clearly as she could, and though she still had a few rough spots, she has come closer than any outside explorer I can remember at really seeing what unschoolers were doing, and why. Her thesis can be read here:
Unschooling Media: Participatory Practices among Progressive Homeschoolers
You can see her photo and intro, and download your own pdf at MIT's link to Valerie's thesis

Our family is the fourth of the five families she interviewed over a period of time, about their use of "media."

This came up in a podcast interview I did in January, 2024 (not yet published; I'll bring a link, maybe, when it's available), so I went to get the link.

---

IMPORTANT NOTE on the salon.com article:

Unschooling dot come is linked, but the current owners of that site have NOTHING to do with the originals. It was created by the editors of Home Education Magazine, and was full and busy for many years, and then closed. It is full of politics now, and I'm sorry it was overtaken.

Some of the original format can be seen here, and some of the links still work.

Unschooling.com's Message Boards: Conversations With Sandra Dodd

Links to other known saves:

sandradodd.com/archive/Conversations/