Academic Motivation Depletes Throughout the School Year
May 30, 2023
Towards the end of the school year, students tend to lose motivation and lack concentration. There are many reasons as to why students lose their focus, with big upcoming tests, quizzes and projects it is harder to balance all of these things while also trying to catch up on missing assignments.
Teenagers can experience sleep deprivation which can result in a lack of motivation. According to kusd, 72.7% of high school students get less sleep than they regularly should, which is eight to 10 hours. Sleep deprivation can cause concentration problems, shortened attention spans, some memory loss and just mentally zoning out. Losing sleep can reduce academic performance and with so much sleep debt added up, it can be hard to regain it all.
Loss of sleep is not the only thing harming students’ school performance; it can also be hard to keep up a good attitude about school and keep up the routines of doing homework. With the weather warming up, many students plan to be outside enjoying the sun and forget about the school work.
Academic motivation is not just a smooth graph, it comes and goes throughout a school year.
“I think that there are definitely waves of interest and motivation at the beginning of the year. I think that everyone starts off strong and they dip a little bit and then Christmas break is a good refresher and during exams people are fine, but then after spring break, people start to crash and burn in all levels of my classes,” math teacher Mrs. Wojcik said. “Not just upper levels and lower levels, it’s all levels. People are just checked out, people who were working hard, people who weren’t working hard, I just see it all across the board.”
Right after spring break, students lose more motivation than ever and just want to get the rest of the school year over with.
Teachers have noticed the motivation loss significantly drop since COVID-19.
“I would say that it is about 95% significantly worse now than it has ever been,” math teacher Mrs. Sahr said.
Even though COVID-19 worsened the academic performance, many schools and teachers have been going back to the way of teaching before COVID. However, students still lose the motivation.
With the stress of the end of the year exams, SAT/PSAT, and other assignments, students seem to just “check out” towards the end of the school year.
