Motivation

As teenagers grow older, their motivation for school generally declines. This decline has to do with the natural process of growing up. Between the ages of 10 and 14 they gain a better understanding of their abilities and appearance in comparison with agemates. Part of this process is their will to make their own decisions instead of having to do what adults want them to do. However, some gifted students have more serious issues with motivation than others. Bureau Talent trains teachers and counsellors how these gifted students can be guided. We have over 10 years of experience and a lot of expertise in doing this work and love to share it with other educational professionals.

Bureau Talent’s Lineke van Tricht is doing research on the motivation of gifted adolescents from families with low socio-economic status. Students from these families are often not (easily) recognized as being gifted and their circumstances make it more difficult to excel at school. This may have an inhibitory effect on their motivation for school. In the PhD project Lineke van Tricht studies the motivation of these students in order to develop an intervention that may improve their motivation in an intrinsic way. The aim of the project is to improve these students’ opportunities to excel in the higher levels of education.