H2O-Centered Education: Helping Education Excellence Flow More Freely

U.S. colleges and universities have been demonstrably ineffective at facilitating scholarship among their students. To become effective, psychological science suggests institutions must tap students’ intrinsic motivations and address their core values from Day 1 through graduation. This article describes a science-based, integrated set of solutions, labeled H2O-centered education, which creates and sustains instructional environments in which students develop and implement well-defined goals aligned with their intrinsic motivations and values, and the institution’s goals. The objective of H2O-centered education is to create educational environments that tap students’ genuine interest, resulting in meaningful student self-exploration and development and enduring and transferable learning.