Fostering Adolescents' Intrinsic Motivation With Stanford Life Design Model

• In Event: Interrogating Consequential Education Research for Adolescents' Psychological Well-Being in China

Abstract

The 2019 coronavirus pandemic creates a mental crisis which impacted people of all ages in China. Prolonged homestay, lack of physical activities and increased conflicts with parents, all of these factors had increased the risk of mental health problems such as depression, anxiety and lack of intrinsic motivation. A recent cross-sectional study has found the prevalence of depression and anxiety to be 43.7% and 37.4% respectively among Chinese adolescents during the COVID-19 outbreak (Zhou, S. J. et al, 2020).
Popular interventions include behavioral therapy, individual counseling and medication treatment. This paper focuses on using the life design model to tackle depression and low intrinsic motivation. Life design model was created by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans at Stanford University. The process of life design is based on design thinking, which encourages learners to design their lives as products. In modern societies, the goal of career and life design interventions is to help each individual respond to the following generic issue: “By what kind of active life might I give meaning and a perspective to my existence?” (Guichard, 2018)
The framework for Life Designing should be structured to facilitate interventions and strategies that are life-long, holistic, contextual and preventive (Maree, 2010a; Savickas et al., 2009). Important factors were considered when designing the online summer camp are gamification instruction and learning, and action-oriented learning. The ultimate goal for the life design course is to increase intrinsic motivation, self-worth and help discover identities.
The present study employs an experiential learning experience that involved 19 participants, aged 10 to 18, 3 from Australia and 16 from China. The whole program lasted for 7 days. 6 learning modules were introduced in this program: Hero’s journey, life design model, assessing the present and design the future, setting learning and life goal, failure immunity and time management. Each of the modules is designed to tackle different issues frequently faced by today’s adolescents. The entire exploration journey starts with becoming their own heroes and taking the responsibility for themselves. Then students learned about solving challenging problems using the tool of design thinking, understanding where they are and imaging where they would like to be in the future. They were also taught how to use the SMART principles to set academic and life goals, how do document failure in journals and how to manage time effectively.
Classroom observation, individual interviews, and parents’ daily observation recording sheets were collected along the program. This program shows that life design models had a positive impact on the adolescents. It helped them find their life goals and improve their intrinsic motivations. They were able to find the purpose and goals of their lives, improve positive thinking and enhance their problem-solving skills using design thinking.

Author

• Zhiwen Xu, The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
  Presenting Author