The Courage to Learn | Language Magazine
Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey, and James Marshall explain how to communicate success criteria to motivate multilingual learners Learning is hard. In fact, there is compelling evidence that exerting mental effort feels aversive. In a meta-analytic review of 170 studies that included 358 different tasks and 4,670 unique participants, the researchers found a “strong positive associa- tion between mental effort and negative affect” (David et al., 2024, p. 1070). At the end of their study, the researchers ask an interesting question: If mental effort is consistently unpleasant, why do people still voluntarily pursue mentally effortful activities? (p. 1091). The researchers do
