Are you a parent or an instructor and have been struggling with ways on how to keep a student in college motivated? There are several actions and strategies that you can take to keep college students motivated.
This article provides a detailed report on these ways and accesses the effects of lack of motivation among students
9 Ways to Motivate Unmotivated College Students
There are different ways to motivate a student but it is important to note that these ways take time. Chances of instant impact are always minimal. The best nine ways to motivate college students include:
1. Reward Efforts and Success
All students in the world today want to feel appreciated. Any valuable effort or success achieved should be rewarded immediately and in public.
Therefore, as a parent or an instructor, you should reward success through rewards and public praise.
2. Encourage the Setting of Goals
One of the causes of lack of motivation among students is the absence of goals that drive them to study. Most students who have no motivation to study lack something that pushes them to study.
As a parent or a teacher, you can ensure that you help the student set realistic goals that they can achieve so that they can fuel them to work harder
3. Good Relationships with Students
As a teacher maintaining a good relationship with your student is crucial in ensuring that they stay motivated.
A good relationship will always encourage the students to approach you whenever they are in need of something and makes it easy for them to take on board everything you say
4. Encouraging Better Self-Talk
As a teacher or parent always make sure that you eradicate negative phrases that students come up with such as “I don’t know” and “I can’t do it.”
Instead, use statements such as, “so far this is what I have found,” or “I found answers that do not work and I’m still trying.”
5. Show Interest
As a teacher or parent, you have to stay motivated to motivate college students. Students can take your example and always keep positive.
Teachers should always research, study, get out of their comfort zone and challenge themselves to be better every day to set an example to the students.
6. Know what to Say
In instances when your students are discouraged, always know what to say to avoid making the situation worse.
For example, when something is challenging you can come up with a statement such as; “I know its challenging but you will eventually get it.”
Also, in group work always use collective complements instead of singling out individuals.
7. Know how to Handle Negative Feedback
Most unmotivated students do not perform well so it is important that you know how to convey negative information to them to ensure that they do not get worse.
Always centre the negative comments to tasks and performances and not the student in person. Always look for a positive in the negatives that will encourage the student to do better.
8. Work out the Student’s Interests
To motivate unmotivated students, you need to start off with what they like most. For example, find out the activities or subjects they like to study and use them as the starting point to motivate them to study.
You can use their activities of interest as rewards for completing tasks. This is one of the ways to deal with laziness among students, both in school and at home.
9. Changing Teaching Models
Students can be unmotivated because as a teacher you have stuck to only classroom work.
Therefore, you can start open classes, the group works or completion in pairs to change up the teaching models and observe whether the students’ willingness to study will improve.
Effects of Lack of Motivation among Students
The effects of lack of motivation among students include;
Truancy
When students are unmotivated, they will miss school without good reason. They will always prefer to remain home other go school.
They will always be involved in activities that they like most and will not mind missing lessons.
Bad Grades
When students do not feel motivated they will not study. They will skip school and miss a lot of classes.
As a result, they will miss important information that is tested in exams.
They are likely to fail because they will have no clue about is in the exams.
Poor Communication
Most unmotivated students do not like sharing their problems with people. They prefer staying alone and their problems remaining unsolved.
Without motivation there is urge to be vocal or socialize with other students.
Disengaging other Students
Students who are not motivated influence the motivated students who eventually start losing interest in studies and school to join the unmotivated bandwagon.
The urge to miss school has a lot of influence and once some students get the chance to do so they never look back. It is easy for students to get unmotivated other than be motivated
Teacher Efforts are wasted
Unmotivated students are unlikely to perform. As a result, it doesn’t matter the amount of time that a teacher spends trying to improve the students.
As long as they are motivated the efforts will go to waste because they will not change the students. This can lead to teachers getting unmotivated too.
Procrastination
Lack of motivation is one of the main causes of procrastination. Students who are not motivated to study will always postpone school work.
They pile up work to the latter of a semester and put themselves in pressure and unhealthy conditions such as stress due to panic once they realize they cannot complete the work in time.
Welcoming Failure
Students who are not motivated to study do not care whether they perform well or not. Once lack of motivation kicks in there is gradual acceptance they do not need to do well in school anymore.
They mostly do not care about their grades and are contented in other activities away from school that make them happy.
Bad Student-Teacher Relationship
Unmotivated students usually hate everything about school and that includes the teachers. As a result, they show little or no respect to teachers leading to uncomplicated relationships between the pair.
Also, most unmotivated students are not cooperative in class and are likely to cause trouble. This likely damages their relationship with teachers.
