Do students care about learning? It depends, one 13-year-old answered. How old are the students?
Sam is evidently onto something. In looking for the answer to whether students care about their schoolwork, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) reports the following:
Over the past two decades, 12th graders have reported a declining interest in school. In 2000, only 28 percent said their schoolwork was “often or always meaningful,” down from the 40 percent who thought their classes were meaningful in 1983. Similarly, in 1983, 35 percent of 12th graders said their courses were “quite or very interesting.” More recently, that figure dropped to 21 percent (2002).
NCES also reports that “the propensity to miss school either by skipping or for other reasons increased notably with grade level” (p. 71). Eleven percent of 8th graders skipped at least one day of school in a 4-week period in 2000; this figure increased to 17 percent for 10th graders and to 33 percent for 12th graders.
Does caring about schoolwork coincide with achievement? It does seem to. In an effort to explore why U.S. students perform worse on international math assessments the older they get (they score in the upper third of all nations in 4th grade math assessments and fall significantly behind the rest of the world by senior year), the Brookings Institution examined high school culture. In a survey of foreign exchange students studying in the United States, the exchange students say that U.S. students do not value success in mathematics as much as teenagers in their home countries do (Loveless, 2001). Success in math is a core value of students in the highest-achieving countries.
A Public Agenda poll reports a more optimistic outlook about kids' attitudes toward school: 8 of 10 students say doing well in school makes them feel good about themselves, and 8 in 10 are upbeat about their education (2002). However, Public Agenda also reports that 71 percent of students say most students in their school do a bare minimum to get by, and 56 percent admit they themselves could try harder.
All this is the bad news. Dick Corbett, one of our authors in this issue, perhaps anticipating such a gloom-and-doom introduction to the issue, wrote us an e-mail:<BQ>Are you aware of the What Kids Can Do Web site (www.whatkidscando.org)? It may be worth mentioning as a good resource for counteracting the widely held view that students are apathetic about learning.</BQ>
A glance at this site, funded by philanthropic foundations and community groups, restores your faith in kids. Kids share ideas and projects meaningful to them—an auto touring guide of Montana, an anti-teasing picture book, a book about September 11, and a selection of interviews called: “Fires in the Bathroom: Advice from Kids on the Front Lines of High School.”
As Dick Corbett and Bruce Wilson report in “What Urban Students Say About Good Teaching” (p. 18), students care very much about learning . . . and teaching. Indeed, authors in this issue have anything but a dim view of students' innate desire to learn. They explore what drives students' learning at school and what interferes with it, and they outline the ways to counteract the despair that haunts some students and the malaise that stifles joy.
Professor of psychology Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (p. 12), author of such books as Flow and Becoming Adult, shares insights about the connections between work and play, between extracurricular and classroom learning, and, especially, between the individual's own will to learn and the support and challenge the school and family offer.
Other authors talk about the kinds of academic programs that inspire learning—from probing provocative questions in science and social studies (p. 24) to discussing ideas in texts (p. 45) to such action-oriented learning as place-based education (p. 30) and school museum projects (p. 74).
Do kids care about learning? The more important question is the one posed by Carol Ann Tomlinson (p. 6): What invites students to learn?
