What causes students not to be interested in problem solving?

Question

Sometimes students lack the drive for problem solving. One might say that they are bored.

However, is there a scientific account on what causes ignorance of problem solving, when they simply are not interested in solving any problem? Like when they think that it is the grown-up's task to solve problems, not theirs.

Answer 1

Nature supplies each of us with a Homo Sapien type brain with 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses. However the brain is plastic and can change its structure based on the way it is programmed psychologically.

Not all people are capable of solving all problems. Our abilities mental and physical are based on what we spend our time doing. Even the banal task that one could imagine is quite exhilarating to another person with a brain which was trained and programmed differently.

First the brains structure is made up of the connections the neurons make. My favorite study which shows this is the Cab Drivers Brain Experiment. It showed that after years of labor (and compared to a control group) London taxi drivers had enlarged in structure posterior hippocampus giving the cabbies the ability to store large amount of navigational data in their brain. (That is not to say that the cabbies all enjoyed driving though.) Another example of this includes changes to accommodate musical ability. Exploiting neural plasticity has led to treatments for dyslexia. Likewise also everyone who uses the internet has seen ads for Luminosity but not everyone knows that it doesn't work well.

People who are mentally ill have connections in their brain that lead them to illness. These connections can be caused by physical or by self-psychological training. That is to say chemical imbalances are often the result of a structural or physical malformations. A brain may for whatever reason produces too much or little neurotransmitter or have many connections to an incorrect part of the brain. If the brain was a terrane the paths traveled more often would eventually become "paved" (somewhat permanent). It take medication and counseling to break up those bad pathways and form new and healthy pathways.

Nature or nurture has resulted in the group of people which I think you describe as somewhat dependent or ADHD. Only proper counselling and perhaps even some medication will be able to free them from their lack of motivation. Even with proper treatment some people will for whatever reason never want to act in the way you see fit. Homework will always be at times left undone. This is a truth no matter how advanced the teacher is in academia or how driven and motivated the pupil.

Answer 2

When you want to study Psychology in Germany, there is currently a numerus clausus of 1.3 (with 1 being the best mark and 6 being the worst). That means that only the best few percent of high school students are admitted to study Psychology (marks are approximately normally distributed between 1 and 4). We have tested the intelligence of our psychology students and found that it ranges from around 100 to around 140, with the majority scoring around 110 to 120. In fact their distribution looks like a 100 to 140 segment of the intelligence bell curve, with only a very few students scoring more than 130. This means that despite them being the top ranking students by school graduation marks, they don't rank among the top intelligent of the population!

Now, if you remember that intelligence is defined as general cognitive problem-solving skill, you cannot be surprised that at least for students of Psychology their problem-solving skills are only mildly above average. That they are not much interested in performing in a field they don't excel at, is not surprising.

With our students, I see the same thing you see with yours. Only a small number of people have this personality trait to an extent that they will excel in any academic discipline. The majority of students are in fact cull: they happen like sawdust. Which is a problem of bad admission selection based on irrelevant characteristics like school marks and memory capacity, which causes good marks in test like the GMAT or high school graduation, but not new ideas in research.

Basically and to sum up, my answer would be: Most students are too stupid to solve problems and are only at a university because better admission selection would cost too much money and because a harsher selection contradicts the current ideology of equality.