Indeed, even among those who are motivated and/or gifted, there exists anxiety and uncertainty about their future in college and in the workplace, hence a potential for academic, career, and social failure.
Growing awareness of the issue fronts surrounding the matter of student motivation prompts concerns about how and to what extent educational professionals and the educational system can affect and empower students' mind-set toward the formation and implementation of their long-range goals. Improvement of academic skills may be one option, and improvement of instructional strategies may be another. There is also, as Levine and Levine (1996) forcefully argue, the question of the interplay of students' academic, family, and social lives, especially during adolescence, when they confront potentially life-altering decisions that they may make around such pop-culture, hot-button, mass-media-inflected issues as suicide, employment, transition from school to work, young-adult delinquency and violence, drug abuse, and teen pregnancy. The wonder then is not so much that as a group adolescents may have trouble with motivation as that they can remain motivated at all.
Specific research questions emerge out of even the most cursory review of the state of affairs regarding student motivation, which implicates teachers, parents, and school systems in case-history outcomes:
What are the main influences, positive and negative, on student motivation for academic and personal success?
What are the best ways of encouraging positive outcomes for the graduating student?
What, if any, curriculum or other intervention has been or can be designed to adequately prepare students for success after graduation?
Who should be involved in the project of influencing and redirecting outcomes, in what manner, and to what extent?
These questions will be explored chiefly though not exclusively in the context of secondary-school public education, wit...