A well-known experience: If you do not feel a sufficient reason (no sufficient motivation) to learn, learning is perceived as difficult.
With motivation, you can absorb and retain learning material more effortlessly. – To build up or strengthen motivation, you should therefore look for additional reasons for learning, for example by asking the following questions:
- “In which situation could I apply the learning material?”
- “When could I use the learning material?” (hopefully quite soon!)
- “To whom could I make a positive impression with the learning content?”
- “How does the new learning content relate to what I already know?”
If you have not been able to find satisfactory answers as a reason for learning, i.e. you do not yet feel sufficiently motivated, a trick can sometimes help: promise yourself an attractive reward in case you successfully complete at least a small amount of learning.
What kind of reward it should be will vary from person to person. For one person it is a small enjoyable coffee break, for another the 200-gram bar of chocolate …
If the trick with the self-created reward has helped you, you can of course use it for the next learning stage. But it is also possible that you have found joy in the learning material itself in the meantime – and thus have a much stronger (primary/intrinsic) motivation – so that you can now do without the reward trick.
A common problem for learning school content is that students may have no (own!) interest at all in the learning content in question. In many cases, neither parents nor teachers manage to arouse interest.
The frequent sigh of parents “My son/daughter does nothing at all for school; he/she is stinking lazy!” should be reconsidered. In most cases, it would be more accurate to say, “Unfortunately, this or that school subject doesn’t interest him or her at all!” Because children are always ‘doing’ something, for example playing with other children, watching TV, playing computer games, …
Sometimes there are also sudden changes in motivation: The subject in question is taught by another teacher …