Purpose-guided education prioritizes intrinsic motivation and helps students become more engaged in learning experiences through connecting their beliefs and life goals to curricular requirements.
The graduation rates increased over 20% over the following ten years, and ensuing publications, collaborative research projects, and other scholarly activities gained national attention.
"[8] The application of purpose-guided education to the college student success discussion reflects a general theme among recent best-sellers and trends.
A battery of popular books reflects this idea of "beginning with the end in mind," as Steven Covey champions in his Seven Habits for Highly Successful People.
Themes throughout the texts of popular writers like John Maxwell, "Dr. Phil" and Parker Palmer imbibe this notion of "alignment," or "merging" a person's core with an articulated life purpose.
Likewise, Alfie Kohn's provocative best-seller, Punished by Rewards,[9] candidly chastises educators for focusing on external issues and incentives instead of intrinsic concerns.
Denise Clark Pope's Doing School likewise challenges the current educational steps to academic "success",[10] a notion also implied in My Freshman Year.
This examination, as outlined in The Purpose-Guided Student,[3] needs to occur against the backdrop of questions about the human condition, similar to those raised in the classics, and in recent thoughtful works dealing with the same.
[15] During the 1980s, considerable focus in education was placed on a student's vocation (instead of career) and aligning life goals with curricular choices instead of following traditional majors without understanding one's passions.
Four key purpose-guided initiatives converged to aid student success efforts, and simultaneously to garner selection among the twelve "founding" (original) institutions in the Foundations of Excellence project.