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  • Student Motivation and Program Participation
  • Robert C. Reardon (bio) and Sara Cummings Bertoch (bio)

Student affairs offices in postsecondary institutions devote time and energy to developing programs for students on a wide array of topics. Inspection of college websites reveals numerous program options, ranging from outdoor recreational activities to leadership development, from current events discussions to health awareness seminars, and from college adjustment workshops to cultural diversity experiences. The views presented in Learning Reconsidered (American College Personnel Association & National Association of Student Personnel Administrators, 2004) conceptualize student services as learning events encompassing a broad spectrum of outcomes. But to what extent are students prepared to engage in such learning? If students lack clarity in terms of their goals, aspirations, and identities, they may not be able to benefit from these learning opportunities.

One setting in which student affairs programs emphasize learning and development is in the area of career services. These professionals are devoted to assessing the need for programs, developing them, and then marketing them to students. In our experience, follow-up evaluations often reveal that some programs were successful with robust participation and positive outcomes, whereas others were not. Perhaps student readiness for learning is a factor in these variable results.

We were interested in identifying students who might be ready to participate at a high level in a program related to career development, and we undertook a search to find a measure that would help us in this process. After reviewing the literature, we settled on the concept of motivation for our work. Given that motivation is one of the most widely studied topics in the behavioral sciences, we focused our instrument search for a measure of generalized student motivation that was brief, theory based, and documented. Moreover, given that our program was related to career development, we added that to the search criteria.

Kohut's Theory of the Self

Our search led us to the goal instability scale (GIS; Robbins & Patton, 1985), which is based on Kohut's (1977) psychology of the self. Kohut's theory includes two lines of development in the normal adult—the grandiose and the idealizing. These two lines, especially the idealizing line, can be useful in understanding how a person engages the career development process.

Kohut's self-psychology added a humanistic component to traditional psychoanalysis, and focused more on personality than on psychological development (Kahn & Rachman, 2000). Kohut posited that, in the grandiose sector, the immature self represents one whose self-worth is obtained from external influences, such as admiration and approval from others. The mature self, on the other hand, is one able to internally regulate and energize self-esteem and ambition. In the idealizing sector, the immature self is again externally regulated and receives a sense of security and direction from powerful others. The mature self possesses an internal system of ideals and values (Robbins, 1989). [End Page 716]

Kohut theorized that an underlying lack of self-cohesion and vulnerable self-esteem contribute to all disorders of the self. These two characteristics are a result of early childhood experiences and the parent's failure to provide the child with an appropriate model for normal grandiosity. Therefore, the child becomes "fixated" in a less mature stage of self-development, characterized by a lack of mature goals and a healthy expression of grandiosity. Such a person is characterized by an inability to empathize with others; a vulnerability to criticism, separation, and loss; and an inability to formulate realistic life plans, or the persistence to meet those plans (Robbins & Patton, 1985).

Motivation as Goal Stability

Kohut's psychology of the self addresses motivation by theorizing that the two lines of development in the normal adult—the idealizing and the grandiose—work together to sustain the structure of experience, which is the primary basis of motivation. Kohut believed that individuals who could not develop and maintain a healthy structure of experience were characterized by a sense of not being "real," "inner emptiness," "falling apart," and a lack of purpose, direction, energy, and focus (Pauchant & Dumas, 1991, p.54).

The idealizing sector of development is thought to lead to a sense of self-cohesion, which is demonstrated by an internalized and coherent system...

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