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"Respondents who saw their families as both challenging and supportive tended to have significantly higher self-esteem than their peers."

"Those who lack challenges and skills, or feel that they are not in balance, evaluate what they do as being neither productive nor playful."

"Intrinsic and extrinsic rewards are NOT mutually exclusive. Adolescents who are often in flow might have an advantage in that they have learned to anticipate more rewards than their peers do. Because they are able to envision more potential rewards for their efforts, they can sustain their motivation even when the task becomes daunting."

"When working on a difficult task, these students perceive a broader range of potential rewards for their efforts. They believe that if they work hard, they will gain material benefits and social recognition as well as the rewards of a job well done."

"students who are often in flow cannot sustain their efforts in most activities through intrinsic motivation alone but also need extrinsic rewards and social recognition for their accomplishments." (continued)

"Eating a meal or shopping is more likely to be seen as play when teens are with their peers and as work when young people are with their families."

"The anxiety of tackling a challenge without having the skills necessary to surmount it is part of the process of learning. It prompts us to develop higher skills in order to return to flow. Alternating anxiety with the satisfaction of a flow experience helps adolescents to understand that learning is indeed a process and that their skills will grow."

"Adolescents who are in flow are the most likely to feel that what they are doing is important to their future goals. Pleasure that is rooted in the activity at hand is also experienced as being related to life's broader framework and thus to future development."

(continued) anxiety, in which the challenge of the activity is higher than average but the skill [required for it] is lower, relaxation, in which skill is reported as higher than average but challenge is lower, and apathy, in which both challenge and skill are below the person's weekly average."

"flow has been identified in previous studies as any event in which a person rates levels of challenge and skill above his or her weekly average... we contrast flow with three other states defined by the ratio of challenge to skills: (continued)

"Why should meeting high challenges with high skills be something we enjoy doing for its own sake, even without extrinsic rewards? ... we are born with a preference for acting at our fullest potential. Perhaps enjoying mastery and competence are evolutionarily adaptive"

"He is also likely to feel that, although the task is difficult, he can succeed at it." AGAIN: USEFUL IN TEACHING.

"Aside from the balance of challenges and skills, enjoyable experiences provide clarity of goals: knowing what must be done from one moment to the next. Another dimension is immediacy of feedback: A person always knows how well he or she is doing." THIS HAS SIGNIFICANT APPLICATION TO TEACHING.

"We see that it is possible, even for notoriously skeptical teenagers, to develop positive attitudes toward the productive side of their lives." So how does this happen? Why do some teenagers develop positive attitudes toward productivity while others don't? What causes that change?

"In a few years, when the longitudinal results of this study become available, we may be able to be more confident about the implications of the findings." - the book was published in 2000; I would love to see further results!

"it is regrettable that with age, the quality of experience during work also deteriorates."

"Disengagement is characterized by teenagers as being neither productive nor enjoyable, and is commonly accompanied by feelings of low self-esteem." Interesting! I wonder why those go together?

"Workers, on the other hand, strive to avoid wasting time and enjoy being occupied, doing a good job, being productive and independent. They expect to be fulfilled through their jobs and therefore have much clearer vocational aspirations."

It is interesting that those who value work are the ones who expect to get something out of it beyond direct compensation.

"Players strive to avoid routine and hope to find fun outside of typical productive roles. In general, they do not expect work to be personally fulfilling and have very hazy ideas of what jobs they might seek once out of school."

"Workers are those students who spend unusually large amounts of time doing work-like activities. Similarly, players were identified as those students who spend unusually large amounts of time in play-like activities."

Unclear if these activities are sorted by researchers or based on how the students viewed them. What happens when some students see a particular activity as play-like and others see it as work-like?

That makes me wonder about the effect of choice within required activity; for example, choosing between different science classes to fulfill the required number of science credits.

"Extracurricular school activities such as orchestra, debate, or athletics and the independent pursuit of art, games, or hobbies produce such balanced responses in many students." Thus choice seems to produce greater engagement.

"Never has there been a society above the level of a hunting-gathering economy where equality of opportunity was achieved."

The word 'above' here is interesting. 'Since' might be a better choice; if we have to sacrifice equity on the altar of economic progress... is that really progress?

"The trend most likely reflects the effects of the 'reality check' that older adolescents are experiencing and the consequent doubts it engenders. A slight disillusionment concerning the future is probably a universal and inevitable feature of growing up and might not signal anything particularly wrong with the current state of society."

"with age, teenagers tend to express significantly less curiosity and enthusiasm about the future and more doubts and worries. It is unlikely that these findings reflect cohort rather than age effects, given the closeness of the four age groups studied and the gradual nature of the changes from sixth to twelfth grade."

Missed a couple of notes:

p 17 - "as production is becoming ever more technologically complex, the expansion of labor opportunities is greatest for the least-skilled and least-desirable positions."

"girls are more likely than boys to respond to extrinsic rewards." Yet, previously, they mention that girls more often expressed preference for a career that involved work they like.

"one should expect that internalized attitudes will conform to one's social context."

There's a chart of activity categories labeled "productive, social, active leisure, passive leisure, maintenance, and other." I wanted to know which activities fit into which categories.