engleski

Positive psychology in education: The best moments of our lives

The start of the 21st century witnessed the emergence of positive psychology, one of the most important developments in the field of psychology. It resulted in increasing number of studies dealing with positive states, positive characteristics and positive communities. Within positive psychology, the concept of well-being (or “happiness”) is generally considered to be a valuable and worthy life goal. Is it the same for our students? Should they be happy during their studies at the university? And if so, why and how? Contemporary approach to well-being conceptualize well-being as flourishing, combination of subjective well-being including experiences of pleasure and satisfaction and psychological well-being including meaningful goal pursuits, positive relations and self-realization. Flourishing is seen by many as being congruent with the goals of higher education, but has been rarely researched. Academic performance and graduation rates are important, but it is also reasonable to expect students to flourish or thrive, in other words to be fully engaged intellectually, socially, and emotionally in the college experience Studies with college students found that flourishing is related to various positive academic outcomes including superior grades, more committmen to college life and lower procrastination. If flourishing has such positive consequences for students, it would be helpful to understand what helps them to flourish. Recent studies suggest that flow may be one of the important factors contributing to students' flourishing. Flow is a highly enjoyable experience in which person is so involved in the activity at hand, completely loses track of time and nothing else seems to matter. Necessary conditions for flow experience to occur include perceived high opportunities for action (challenges) balanced with high personal skills. Research has shown that flow in academic activities is less frequent than flow in other areas of college students' life (such as leisure, maintenance or part-time job). However, the relationship between flow in academic domain and flourishing is the strongest. One of the reasons for such relationship is that flow makes students happy and flourishing in activities they perceive as meaningful, important and useful for their future life goals and development of their social identity. Also, it was found that flow in academic activities reduces stress and burnout. Keeping in mind positive outcomes of flow it would be of great importance for university teachers and education authorities to have an understanding of the specific characteristics of flow inducing academic activities. Studies show that students’ involvement is crucial for flow state to emerge. Flow it is the least frequent during lectures and the most frequent while preparing for seminars, preparing for exams and during practical activities related to students interest and future profession. Academic activities should be designed to offer students possibilities to use and develop their skills in these kinds of activities. Such challenging and meaningful activities would encourage intrinsic motivation , the the quality of students’ academic experiences and consequentlly their well-being.

academic flow ; college students ; flourishing ; positive psychology ; well-being

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