What if the missing ingredient in student achievement isn’t better curriculum, tech, or teachers, but better motivation? What if the key to unlocking motivation isn’t something intrinsic to students, but something found in their relationships with peers, teachers, mentors, and communities? And what if the one thing AI can’t do is the one thing students need most?
I recently read 10 to 25, a new book by David Yeager, one of the leading research psychologists in adolescent development and motivation. The book explores what young people need most between the ages of 10 and 25 to thrive. In the book, Yeager challenges the prevailing view that adolescents’ seemingly irrational choices—like taking risks, ignoring consequences, or prioritizing peer approval over academics—result from underdeveloped brains. Instead, he offers a more generous—and frankly more illuminating—framing: adolescents are evolutionarily wired to seek status and respect.
That framing resonates with what Clayton Christensen and Michael Horn wrote over a decade ago. They observed that the Jobs to Be Done that seem to motivate students center on feeling successful and having fun with friends. Yeager’s insights sharpen the developmental psychology behind that earlier articulation.
And they point to a crucial insight for education: the key to unlocking students’ motivation, especially in adolescence, is helping them see that they have value—that they are valued by the people they care about and that they are meaningful contributors to the groups where they seek belonging. That realization has implications not just for how we understand student engagement, but for how we design schools…and why AI alone can’t get us where we need to go.
Amid rapid AI advances, many in education are optimistic that AI will finally crack the student engagement puzzle. With its ability to personalize learning, tutor across subjects, and respond instantly to student input, AI promises a more adaptive and responsive learning experience. Some even argue that these capabilities will naturally lead to greater motivation and engagement—that if we just give students tools that adjust to their pace and preferences, they’ll lean in. But that vision overlooks something deeper.
Human survival has long depended on our ability to operate in groups and individuals contributing meaningfully to those groups. Adolescence, in particular, is the stage of life when we begin learning how to become valued members of a group. The challenge of learning how to earn social belonging and respect is not a distraction from human development—it is human development. And motivation, for adolescents, flows from that deep biological imperative.
Motivation is social, not just internal
For years, education reformers have tried to crack the motivation code. We’ve discussed grit, growth mindset, intrinsic motivation, relevance, autonomy, and purpose. All of those are real. But Yeager’s framing highlights something more primal: for adolescents, motivation is intensely social. They are wired to care about how they’re seen. They want to matter to people whose opinions they value.
In that light, motivation isn’t just about drive—it’s about social reward. If a learning activity helps you become someone of value in your social group—if it earns you the respect and belonging you crave—you’ll throw yourself into it. If it doesn’t, even the most thoughtfully scaffolded experience can fall flat. This is why motivation is so uneven across contexts. The same kid who’s listless in geometry class might spend hours mastering intricate choreography, modding a video game, or grinding on a skateboard trick—because those activities earn them something socially.
This is why learning becomes powerful when it’s embedded in community. It’s not enough to give students choices or tailor the pace. They have to feel that the work they’re doing helps them become someone of value to the people around them.
The myth that self-directed learning is only for a select few
A few years ago, I remember reading a critique of personalized learning that went something like this: “It works for autodidacts like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg—but most kids aren’t like that.” The idea was that personalized learning assumes a level of self-direction that most students don’t have.
At the time, that critique gave me pause. But the more I’ve observed students in and out of school, the more convinced I’ve become that it’s based on a faulty assumption. Most kids are autodidacts—they just don’t learn school subjects autodidactically.
Watch what happens when a kid gets into Minecraft. Or basketball. Or Taylor Swift. Or anime. Or makeup tutorials. Or skateboarding. Or modding computers. Kids teach themselves astonishingly complex things through trial, error, iteration, and YouTube. They’ll memorize elaborate lore, master mechanics, mimic skills, and explain them to others—all without being assigned a single worksheet.
So, the problem isn’t that most kids aren’t self-directed learners. The problem is that school content often lacks any social payoff. It doesn’t help them feel valued or earn respect in the social contexts they care about. And so, understandably, they disengage.
Derek Muller, creator of the science YouTube channel Veritasium, powerfully made this point during a recent talk. After showing one of his classic street interview segments—where he asks everyday people basic science questions that many fumble to answer—he surprised the audience by pushing back against their laughter.
He said, “Our brains are designed to help us be effective in this world, which means finding food and shelter, finding a mate, integrating socially so that we’re not ostracized, being able just to hang out and have fun. All of those things are what we should be doing.” In other words, humans are wired to focus on social survival. Muller acknowledged that while scientific literacy is essential, it’s understandable that many people don’t prioritize it. They’re busy navigating social media, relationships, and real-world concerns.
“I think it’s understandable,” he said, “that a lot of people don’t focus on that, don’t know that, don’t think about it. It’s not part of the world that they exist in… because that’s about connecting with other people.”
His point aligns with Yeager’s: for most people, and especially for adolescents, the drive to connect socially is far more pressing than mastering academic content. When school doesn’t align with those social realities, it often gets deprioritized.
Why traditional schools don’t motivate most learners
That insight sheds light on why the conventional grammar of schooling fails so many students. Schools typically offer only a few narrow paths to earn status and respect: academics, athletics, and sometimes leadership roles like Associated Student Body (ASB) or student council. If you happen to be good at one of those, great—you’re in the game. But if you’re not? You’re mainly on the sidelines.
What’s worse, we’ve layered on a college-for-all narrative that subtly devalues other sources of status and contribution. Getting a job, starting a business, apprenticing, or helping your family—these are often treated as second-tier outcomes. That means for students who struggle with academic content or don’t shine in the field or on the court, school offers no credible path to mattering.
And when students can’t earn status or respect through the formal structures of school, they create alternative hierarchies. Cliques, social tribes, and student-defined status games become ways to navigate identity and belonging. Adults may not sanction these, but they serve the same deep purpose: to help students figure out where they belong and how to be valued.
To make matters worse, school structures are often explicitly ranked. In band, you’re ranked by chair. In sports, the starting lineup. In academics, by GPA and class rank. These rankings don’t just provide feedback—they confer identity. They divide students into winners and losers in the domains the school has decided to prize. That further fuels the search for alternative ways to feel successful.
So, students turn to trendiness, humor, rebellion, or other creative ways of being “seen” by peers. They may not be aiming for status in the honor roll sense, but they’re absolutely trying to be someone of value in the eyes of others.
Why AI can’t fill the gap
Enter AI. Over the past year, we’ve seen a surge of interest in how AI can personalize learning, adapt to student needs, and tutor across subjects. It can also help students design their learning journeys, generate creative ideas, or receive iterative feedback on their work. There’s real promise here.
But if we mistake AI for a complete solution to the motivation problem, we’ll be sorely disappointed.
AI can’t confer status or respect. And that matters more than most people realize.
Here’s why: human respect is scarce. People only have so much time, attention, and emotional bandwidth. They must be selective about where they invest their time, who they include, and what kind of contributions they recognize, especially in collaborative or competitive group settings. That selectivity is what gives human respect its meaning.
By contrast, AI is infinitely available and unconditionally responsive. You can talk to it all day, and it will always be supportive. But that’s precisely what makes its feedback meaningless regarding recognition and belonging. An AI doesn’t have limited time, bandwidth, and resources that force it to make tradeoffs. AIs don’t choose us to be on their teams or decide that relationships with us are worth their time.
Unless AI technology evolves to a point where it plays a meaningful role in real social systems, where time, attention, and affirmation are scarce and must be earned, it will fall short of solving the motivational challenge. We may be approaching that kind of world—a scenario my colleague Julia Freeland Fisher warns about, where AI begins to substitute for the human relationships essential to development and belonging. But if it ever does reach that point, we’ll be living in a very different sci-fi-esque world where the rules of human connection are being redefined, and where questions about whether AI can motivate students may be the least of our concerns.
This lens might help explain what researchers call edtech’s “5% problem.” Studies have found that while many online learning programs can produce significant gains when used at recommended dosages, only about 5% of students actually use them as recommended. Why? Researchers have offered a range of explanations for this gap, from inconsistent implementation by schools to the possibility that higher-achieving students are simply more likely to stick with the programs. Of course, structural barriers—like scheduling, accountability policies, and tech access—also play a role in why usage remains low. Nonetheless, I hypothesize that motivation is the missing piece that can offer the most significant impact. These tools may be engaging and enjoyable at first, but their novelty wears off quickly. Compared to apps and games designed purely for entertainment, edtech rarely wins the attention battle on its own.
What keeps students coming back, I believe, isn’t just better software. It’s the social context around the learning. If students saw working hard in these programs as something that earned them status and respect—something that made them matter in the eyes of their peers, teachers, and parents—I think we’d see far more students using the software at levels that accelerate their achievement. Yet I suspect many teachers are disinclined to make software usage a major mechanism for conferring status and respect in their classrooms because encouraging more screen time doesn’t feel like real teaching.
This motivational lens could also help explain why high-dosage tutoring tends to outperform self-paced software, even when both offer personalized learning. Software might be better at diagnosing and targeting academic gaps. A tutor might be better at connecting learning to a student’s interests. But the biggest difference may be the power of relationships. Most students care, at least a little, about whether their tutor respects them. That creates a subtle but powerful lever: a human relationship where affirmation must be earned, not automatically given. That dynamic—the inherent scarcity of attention and regard—gives human interaction its motivational force. And it’s what software alone can’t replicate.
The real design challenge: Build full-stack motivational contexts
For decades now, improving student achievement has been one of the most persistent imperatives in education. Billions of dollars and countless reforms have gone toward efforts to raise test scores and close achievement gaps. And yet, across the board, progress has been modest and inconsistent.
Over a decade of Gallup polling, as well as research cited in Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop’s new book The Disengaged Teen, highlight a fundamental problem: most students, especially in middle and high school, are disengaged from school. And if they’re disengaged, they’re not motivated to learn. We’ve tried improving curricula. We’ve focused on teacher preparation and professional development. We’ve reformed accountability systems. But maybe what we’ve been missing all along is the fuel that makes any of those efforts matter: students’ motivation.
Motivation isn’t just another variable in the equation—it could be the multiplier. I believe unlocking student motivation could prove more powerful for boosting achievement than any levers we’ve traditionally tried, like dumping jet fuel on a campfire. None of this is to say content doesn’t matter—good curriculum is essential. But without the motivational fuel to engage with it, even the best-designed content can fall flat.
We already have examples to show that when students are motivated, the results can be explosive. At Alpha School in Austin, Texas, students complete core academic subjects in just two hours per day—and yet their academic growth rates are more than double national averages. At Khan World School, a partnership between ASU Prep and Khan Academy, students have shown learning growth as high as 2 to 5 times national norms in math, reading, and language arts. These are not marginal improvements. They are step-function leaps.
Technology plays a key role in these models, allowing students to move at their own pace, get real-time feedback, and explore personalized learning paths. But I don’t believe it’s the technology alone that drives these outcomes. It’s the way the technology enables these schools to redesign the social learning experience—to create environments where students see learning as something that makes them more valuable contributors in the social worlds they inhabit.
That’s the deeper design challenge. It’s not just about deploying the right tools—it’s about constructing a social context where learning matters. That raises an important question: Is social motivation primarily from the school in schools like Alpha and Khan World School? Or is it relying heavily on the support structures, relationships, and cultural norms students bring from outside, especially from their families?
If it’s the latter, then scaling those results may prove difficult. But if it’s the former—if the school is generating the motivational context—then the real opportunity lies in figuring out how. How do we replicate or adapt those dynamics so more students, from more backgrounds, experience school as a place where learning leads to social value?
Answering that question could be the key to reimagining school not just as a place where learning happens, but as a place where motivation flourishes—and achievement follows.
A new lens on motivation
We’ve spent years trying to personalize learning. But maybe we’ve focused too much on tailoring content and not enough on transforming context.
The real key to motivation isn’t just autonomy or relevance. It’s the opportunity to earn status and respect, to be valued by people who matter, and to contribute meaningfully to a group. That’s what most school systems fail to provide. And that’s what AI, for all its brilliance, can’t replicate on its own.
Most kids are already autodidacts. Our job isn’t to teach them how to learn. It’s to create environments where learning helps them become someone in a world that sees and values them for it.
The next big educational innovation won’t come from more intelligent AI. It will come from communities that design AI-powered education where learning earns you respect in the real world.
