Beyond “Fine”
Learning Without Joy
Finding 2
Many students report that even when they feel like they’re learning, they don’t love school. The majority say that school feels irrelevant, is boring, and offers them few opportunities to take charge of their learning.
The Leaps Student Voice Survey examines student experiences through the lens of the six Leaps. It also contains two “general questions” that ask whether students feel like they’re learning and whether they love going to school. We found a significant gap in responses to these two questions: While most students report they’re learning in school, fewer than half say they love going to school.
In fact, as the chart below illustrates, a quarter of students (25%) reported that they are learning a lot in school, but don’t love it. In contrast, a third of students (30%) reported neither learning a lot in school nor loving school, while 40% reporting both learning a lot in school and loving it. Only 5% reported that they loved school despite not learning a lot. While these data obviously don’t prove a causal relationship, they are suggestive of the importance of the quality of experiences in school; nearly all children who love school share that they’re learning a lot. In contrast, it’s entirely possible for a student to feel like they’re learning but to dread going to school each day nonetheless.
Of course, it’s possible that students’ self-reported perception of learning isn’t a reliable indicator of their actual learning; while a majority of students believe that they learn a lot in school, the true percentage of students who are being intellectually challenged every day may be lower or higher. In contrast, students’ self-perception of how much they enjoy school (or more accurately, how much they don’t) is more likely to reflect reality. And the consequences of these data are stark: Nearly 25% of students are chronically absent, meaning that they miss more than three weeks of the school year. Finding 1 examines the relationship between student experiences and attendance in more detail.
—High School Student, North Carolina
Students are supported to meet goals…but are not given the opportunity to set goals of their own.
Students are given access to learning…but not for things they want to learn about.
Students are more likely to receive academic interventions…than meaningful choices.
Students are supported to meet goals…but are not given the opportunity to set goals of their own.
Students are given access to learning…but not for things they want to learn about.
Students are more likely to receive academic interventions…than meaningful choices.
These findings were consistent across race, ethnicity, and economic status. Unfortunately, schooling experiences that feel irrelevant and disempowering are a consistent reality for young people across every type of community.
Our findings add to a growing body of research on the quality of students’ experiences in school. Research from CASEL, Pew Research Center, and the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence provides additional evidence that most students find school boring, irrelevant, or meaningless, and recent books like The Disengaged Teen and 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People have brought this research mainstream.
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