You may be interested to know that Summer camps have a lasting positive effect on your kids. This is according to Stanford University psychologist Paul O’Keefe and his co-authors who assessed a group of grade 8, 9 and 10 students before, during and after summer “enrichment programs”.
In their study released in this month’s journal Motivation and Emotion, the researchers looked at the teenagers’ attitude towards learning – were they interested in learning for learning’s sake, called “mastery orientation” or in showing off their current knowledge, called “performance orientation”. As expected the mastery orientation is a more positive way of learning linked to high levels of motivation and engagement.
The researchers found that during summer enrichment programs, students favored a mastery approach and that to their surprise they continued to embrace this approach after they returned to school.
The focus of this study was on academic programs. The key characteristics, and redeeming features, of these enrichment programs are:
- The promotion of collaboration, playing down competition among students
- The instructors encourage students “to draw their own conclusions and justify them, explore aspects of class subjects that interest them most, and make decisions regarding what they prefer to learn and how they would like to learn those materials.”
- They reward intellectual risk-taking, and avoids punishing students for failed experiments.
- Feedback given to students recognizes effort and growth and focuses on the learning process, rather than on its outcome.
