warning

Should Instructors Make Learning Fun?

Any college teacher will have faced at one point in their career a plea from students to have class outside. The weather is so beautiful, they say. The teacher agrees and begins teacher, but things interfere. The class doesn't get anything done. A truck goes by. The wind blows papers noisily away. Believe it or not, one of my teaching jobs was at a university overlooking a beach. I gave in a few times, thinking that the activity would motivate them and that learning might be more fun.

Learning needn't not be fun, should it? With educational software, the fun quotient (after factoring out the software and hardware glitches and the time to learn it), tends to be pretty high. By Lepper and Malone's criteria, good educational software offers the feeling of control, fantasy, curiosity and challenge. That produces fun.

But does learning have to be fun? A piece of software that produces learning and makes the student aware of progress might give a sense of satisfaction that compensates for the lack of fun. A student reads a book -- is that fun? A teacher assigns the book; in actuality the student would never have read this book. In other words, the teacher is attempting to impose his/her sense of fun on students. Well, perhaps "impose" is too strong a word. What a teacher decides to be motivating and fun could turn out to be boring for students (and one underlying reason has to do with the children's exposure to the latest technology and the lag time between the date a teacher can actually use it in class).

So then, even if the teacher wants learning to be fun, that teacher might be clueless about what produces fun for students. Students go to school expecting to learn, not to have fun. At some point students will rebel if they feel the time in class is not being maximixed for learning. It all comes out in evaluation. If using a computer software or tool doesn't result in better portfolios or grades on a test, then a student will treat the whole class as "relax time" (although there may be sound pedagogical reasons for fostering this atmosphere, especially in foreign language classes). Conspicuously absent from the articles is the primary motivator of all: grades. Students do what they do not for adventure or a sense of fun or the desire for betterment; they do it because it is required and they want better grades. If given a choice between an easy but boring class or a hard class that is often fun, the first inclination of the student is to seek the easy A. In a sense, that is the ultimate reinforcement that trumps any other sort of motivation.

Students probably want more than good grades; certainly they are more complicated than that, but the need for good grades trumps any other motivation. The two can't be discussed apart from one another. The need for good grades makes students more likely to pick the easy topic, to not diverge from the prescribed path of learning. But what if classes no longer gave grades? Schools have often toyed with the idea in some form, but to really implement it would challenge basic assumptions. If students don't need grades, why do they need to be required to take a certain class or to come to class at all? Students operate within a web of social requirements and parental expectations. If these requirements are removed, how and what would students learn? If you look at the student's knowledge of things that interest them (baseball, internet, music, travel), you'll see that their motivation for learning has to do with what they do outside of class and whatever knowledge results in admiration of peers. Informal learning situations without the typical requirements are less structured and ultimately more satisfying for the students. Why? It reinforces a young person's sense of accomplishment and doesn't pull at his independence. One might argue that if students never went to class, their knowledge would face many gaps (such as history, trigonometry or physics). But that criticism isn't convincing. Instead we should be asking, "Are cosines and sines really relevant to the students' world?" And if a certain subject is not relevant to a students' world, what is the point of exposing these things to the student in the first place?

(The paper is now over, but the response occurred to me. Here it is. Yes, it is true that students will pursue various learning activities on their own. Unfortunately, the real-life bodies of knowledge are shaped by the media and youth culture, which unfortunately ignore anything that is not sexy or stylish or new. Conversely, if a student doesn't have an algebra class and merely is allowed to learn what or she chooses, it's hard to imagine that any extracurricular activity in the real world might explain the fundamentals of algebra in any context. The more likely problem is that students accumulate a lot of skills and bodies of knowledge of various levels of difficulty, and the student may have to wait a long time before a club or user group meeting goes over fundamentals).