In the beginning pages of chapter 12, Zull tells the story of teaching a class using a game as the learning activity. He stresses that the results of this game on his students’ learning was problematic for two reasons, 1) the game was “not designed to build on prior knowledge” and 2) the content of the questions didn’t matter to the students’ lives. Zull writes that the students remembered only the superficial, non-academic parts of the game such as who they were playing against, who won and who lost.

I have found this problematic myself in classes. I have often wanted to play a game of jeopardy or trivia with the class to review some text or material before a test but found that the content did not stick in the students’ minds. I think this all comes back to basic student motivation. I have written a great deal this semester about my belief in the importance of relating subject and lesson materials and learning goals to students’ lives. I think the only way to build intrinsic motivation to learn is if we portray the information in a way that seems desirable to learn. I think Zull is in agreement. He uses an example of a scientific experiment done on rats which attempted to provoke a link between the rats’ sense of basic survival—triggered by stimulation of the nucleus basalis—and a separate auditory stimulus (Zull 224). The proper analogy would then be to relate the material of a lesson in a way that made it seem important to the students’ survivals, which I’m sure is not possible most of the time. Though Zull’s example may be just a starting point for a broader conversation about learning, stimulation and intrinsic motivation.