Motivating the Desire to Learn
What Makes Visitors Want to Learn? was the intriguing title of the feature article appearing in the May/June 1995 issue of Museum News. The article, authored by Mihaly Csikszentm
Motivating the Desire to Learn
What Makes Visitors Want to Learn? was the intriguing title of the feature article appearing in the May/June 1995 issue of Museum News. The article, authored by Mihaly Csikszentmihályi and Kim Hermanson of the University of Chicago, examines visitors’ intrinsic desire to learn from museum exhibitions.
Though clearly written for exhibit planners and designers, the article has important implications for staff and volunteer educators. These unsung (at least within the context of the aforementioned article) stalwarts of the museum profession grapple with issues of motivation and learning all the time, and on the most immediate levels. For, they must motivate and engage today’s arriving visitor regardless of (and sometimes in spite of) their institution’s exhibit design or installation.
Csikszentmihályi and Hermanson begin by drawing distinctions between learning that is externally motivated and that which is motivated internally. Extrinsic actions are motivated by the anticipation of external rewards, such as grades in school or a paycheck at work. Intrinsic actions are motivated by the anticipation of internal rewards, such as satisfying one’s personal curiosities and interests.
“Schools,” Csikszentmihályi and Hermanson state, “can afford to ignore intrinsic rewards to a certain extent because they have strong external incentives to enforce learning — grades, truant officers, etc. But museums, without external means to compel a visitor’s attention, must rely almost exclusively on intrinsic rewards.
“Museum visitors may at first attend to an exhibit because of curiosity and interest. But,” the authors warn, “unless the interaction with the exhibit becomes intrinsically rewarding, the visitors’ attention will not focus on it long enough for positive intellectual or emotional changes to occur.”
The authors inform readers that studies in a variety of settings reveal “that a common experimental state characterizes situations in which people are willing to invest psychic energy in tasks for which extrinsic rewards are absent.” This state of intrinsic motivation, which the authors term “flow,” has several general attributes.
- opportunities for thorough involvement and for making personal discoveries;
- an open process that is accommodating of various viewpoints;
- an experience where challenges are tailored to the learner’s level of ability and experience;
- an atmosphere that is positive and reinforcing; and
- where individually meaningful experiences can connect with the experience of others.
Let’s investigate these five attributes that characterize flow experiences, and consider how we might incorporate them into our museum teaching.
Involvement and Personal Discoveries
Intrinsic motivation at its most intense and rewarding, Csikszentmihályi and Hermanson tell us, “involves the person’s entire being and full capacity …. [Such] activities provide a sense of discovery — we discover things about ourselves as well as the environment.”
In the vast majority of circumstances, listening to gallery talks or lectures is basically passive and non-participatory. Similarly, listening rarely involves a person’s “entire being and full capacity.” The one exception to this may be listening to stories. Storytelling has the potential to fully engage and activate listeners. Effective storytellers compel their audiences to consider, envision, and emote, engaging their sensory and emotional faculties, along with intellectual ones.
In addition, listening rarely leads to discovering things about one’s self. Rather, listening usually entails hearing about the discoveries made by people other than ourselves. We discover things about ourselves by being challenged and then uncovering resources from within that arise to meet that challenge.
Engagement, full participation, and self-discovery – – these are characteristic of situations where “doing” takes place. “Doing,” or “active learning,” can be provoked using carefully constructed questions or statements that challenge and provoke visitors to seek, acquire, and integrate information, and to form solutions. When actively learning, visitors involve themselves with museum resources; they extend themselves; and they discover their own capability to retrieve information and formulate ideas that, previously, may have seemed removed to them.
Openness and Accommodation
Csikszentmihályi and Hermanson inform us that “information that is presented as true without alternative perspectives discourages the motivation to explore and learn more …. Intrinsically motivated learning is an open process involving uncertainty and the discovery of new possibilities.”
Those who teach toward active learning should ask questions that embrace a variety of responses. They should use open-ended questions that do not have pre-determined answers. These questions enfranchise a full range of responses that can be supported by each person’s individual perspective and point-of-view.
The purpose of questioning is to enfranchise and involve visitors. It is not to test or t