Educating the whole person: Broad extracurricular involvement and prevalence of purpose and thriving among college students in China.

College students in China can choose from a wide variety of university organized extra-curricular activities (EAs), which are intended to enrich and deepen the learning experience, and reflect an educational policy goal to cultivate the whole and well-rounded person. These activities are also consistent with another policy goal, which is to foster optimal student outcomes like life purpose development. This study examined associations between EA involvement and life purpose and associations between EA involvement and thriving attributes of resourcefulness/resilience and life satisfaction among 332 undergraduate students enrolled at 20 universities across China.

Qualitative Purpose Profiles of Chinese Student Teachers.

Teachers are well positioned to help students cultivate their purpose in life, which is an asset that is associated with optimal development. Teachers must also have a grasp on their own sense of purpose, especially during times of intense social pressure and change, when the capability to sustain and support worthy aims may impart personal resilience and contribute to the social good. To train educators who have this capability, it is therefore vital for teacher education programs to in turn understand their own students' individualized purpose statuses.

Conclusion: Recommendations for how practitioners, researchers, and policymakers can promote youth purpose.

Initially drawing from, yet then expanding on the research discussed in this volume, this article discusses specific measures that practitioners, researchers, and policymakers can take to support purpose among youth. Strategies for educators include utilizing practical purpose teaching tools, such as purpose interviews, purpose-related discussions, whole classroom and school community games, and purpose survey methodologies. Research strategies include expanding the study of youth purpose to more diverse groups of young people, and developing more succinct tools to assess purpose in research.

Promoting youth purpose: a review of the literature.

This article reviews the research literature on teaching and supporting purpose in adolescence and young adulthood. An extensive search revealed that most studies on youth purpose examine psychological correlates and neglect instructional and social supports. School is an effective context for fostering purpose, yet reported approaches for explicitly instructing for purpose are rare after the early 1990s, reflecting a trend away from a language of purpose as a discrete endeavor in education since at least the 1960s.

Youth purpose and positive youth development.

This chapter reviews research and findings on youth purpose as it relates to positive youth development (PYD) and thriving. The authors note that purpose is defined in multiple ways in the youth development literature, including one-dimensional and multi-dimensional definitions, and those that combine purpose with other constructs, like meaning. Although research on youth purpose and thriving is in its early stages, however, multiple other purpose-like constructs appear in the positive youth development literature, such as life goals, contribution, and sparks, that can tell us about how purpose and PYD may interact.