What we have learned from cognitive psychology research, above all else, is that children must be engaged and encouraged to participate in order to learn. Our school system fails miserably on this score. Mahaly Csikczentmihalyi and his students investigated how children feel about their experiences in school. They gave children beepers to wear. When the beepers went off, the children filled out descriptions of the experiences they were having at the moment. One of the questions Csikczentmihalyi asked was why the children were engaged in whatever activity they were performing. Children could respond in one (or more) of these three ways:
Csikczentmihalyi found that in over 30,000 experience reports, not one child indicated that he was doing a task solely because he wanted to. Occasionally, children would say that they were engaged in a task because they wanted to and had to, for example, but they never said they did something simply because it was what they desired to do!
Considering the Future of the Book
Where am I in the content of the book?
