Identification and Cause of Calvin's Motivation Patterns

In this comic, Calvin plans to dig up dinosaur bones from the soil, glue them together, and restore the dinosaur in order to win the Nobel Prize and get rich. However, Calvin has issues with “task analysis.” The Nobel Prize and millions of dollars are his imagined rewards, which are also ultimate goals that ignore his current circumstances. Calvin does not possess the ability to achieve this ultimate goal in the real world, as it requires the knowledge he despises. In other words, Calvin fails to set specific, attainable proximal goals based on his current learning stage, nor does he strategically plan how he will achieve these goals, which are key pieces of the forethought phase of Self Regulated Learning.

Calvin’s issues with “task analysis” stem from his disregard for the importance of personalized proximal goals and the fact that achieving an appealing ultimate goal requires accomplishing countless proximal goals along the way. Ignoring these steps sets him up for failure and will only increase difficulty later in the process of achieving his goal, increasing the likelihood of failure. In this case, Calvin is only blindly following a grand interest of the moment. Therefore, he cannot effectively organize actions in the current learning stage, gain a sense of accomplishment in task completion, and reinforce the motivation for future efforts.

In this comic, Calvin’s father is trying to teach him math and tells him, “Every job requires some math,” but Calvin insists, “I can get along fine without math.” Calvin has issues with intrinsic interest and learning goal orientation. His father is trying to establish the “instrumental value” of math, but Calvin believes that math has no connection with the life he yearns for, so math learning is valueless—the “cost” of learning math, i.e., the boredom and frustration of the learning process, far outweighs its “benefits,” i.e., a future that is not more attractive because of mastering math. Calvin tries to justify the fact that he lacks intrinsic interest in math and does not value the process of learning it.

However, Calvin ignores the connection between the things he currently cares about and math (for example, restoring dinosaurs requires calculating the proportions of different parts of the dinosaur), which makes him overlook the value that math might have in helping him achieve his own goals. This is in part because he lacks a clear, attainable proximal goal. Without such a goal, he does not know what might be required to accomplish it. As a result, Calvin feels that the task of learning math is irrelevant since there is no connection to a goal to inspire him. This leaves him demotivated to learn.

In this comic, Calvin offers to trade his grades for money with his father. He equates the motivation to learn with obtaining immediate, quantifiable external rewards, revealing his lack of internal motivation. It also shows that for Calvin, his outcome expectation is that learning is a negative experience that only brings pain unless there is external “compensation.” Moreover, Calvin eventually says he thought he could “make an easy four bucks,” which indicates that even with the tempting external motivation, he still has low self-efficacy. If this plan were implemented, Calvin’s reflection stage would shift from “What methods did I use, and how can I improve?” to “Did I make a profit or a loss on this grade?” This deviates from the true purpose of learning and essentially erodes rather than builds true motivation.

In this comic, when Calvin is facing a research report, he creates an “atomic brain enhancer” out of a colander, wires, and other items to stimulate inspiration. This is the strategy he takes to exert self-control, force himself to focus, and implement the task, but it is absurd and ineffective. Calvin also has a deviation in monitoring direction. Effective self-monitoring should focus on indicators that can truly affect learning performance, but Calvin’s monitoring is entirely concentrated on fantasies related to the device but unrelated to the task, such as whether the grounding wire “has inspiration surging.” Moreover, this is actually an escape from self-control, transferring the cognitive responsibility from Calvin himself to the device. Even if the report fails, it can avoid Calvin directly facing the self-denial brought by his own lack of knowledge or effort.

In this comic, Calvin’s father asks Calvin to explain his poor grade. Calvin admits that he forgot to review and eventually starts pretending to have amnesia after his father’s repeated questioning. The responses “I forgot” and “Where am I? Who am I” are actually Calvin’s way of avoiding attribution after comparing himself with other standards (such as his absolute score or the scores of other students). This is because attribution implies acknowledging failure in both the forethought and performance phases. Pretending amnesia is even more fundamentally a refusal to engage in any meaningful self-evaluation than forgetting to review. This also prevents Calvin from generating any strategies for improving his learning. Moreover, it may reinforce Calvin’s belief in using “avoidance and defense” to deal with school performance issues, undermining his self-efficacy in the next “forethought phase.”