If this list does not convince us that purpose should be systematically supported, it is useful to know that the benefits of purpose are further embodied in what it does for both the person and society at large. Noble purposes are stable goals that matter to the young person who has them; moreover, they connect that young person to matters that are greater than himself or herself. According to research on purpose in today’s American youth, these greater matters include social causes, country, family, faith, the arts, and work, to name a just a few. Whatever the content of one’s noble purposes, the point is that having that purpose in life helps the young person forge a unity between matters of self and other. Purpose builds a link between one’s personal interests and activities and that innate human desire to make a significant difference to the social context in which one lives. Purpose thus provides an authentic pathway for youth to concomitantly serve interests of self and community. Particularly for American youth, this authenticity is key because it is a response to Western ways of thinking that traditionally separate interests for self and other.

Several other compelling facts of a more sociological nature portend a focus on supporting youth purpose in research, policy, and practice. First, changes in the life span of the U.S. population over the past twenty years have significantly extended the period from childhood to adulthood. It has created a longer period of moratorium during which young people are pressed to form life agendas. This extended period places greater emphasis on finding meaningful purposes that youth can act on in the moment and are not just related to what they will accomplish when they become adults. We can add to this the recent global economic downturn that has significantly affected young people’s opportunities in career development and higher education, and it is not uncommon to find that many youth find forming a positive vision of their future a challenge. In fact, recent studies suggest that only a small percentage of youngsters at any age are able to form positive purposes.

Unfortunately, some writers and voices in the media explain away the apparent purposelessness of today’s youth by problematizing the younger generation. Many attribute negative qualities to today’s youth that they claim predispose them to purposelessness. But to accept this explanation not only marginalizes young people, but it risks missing out on making important educational, research, and policy gains for positive youth and community development—and ones that would promote well-being for people of all ages. In contrast, the articles in this volume of New Directions for Youth Development are countercultural. Instead of blaming today’s youth for the sociological trends, they focus on addressing whole community practices within the contexts in which American youth live.

Several of the articles in this volume stem from youth purpose research conducted at the Stanford Center on Adolescence by William Damon and supported by the John Templeton Foundation and the Thrive Foundation for Youth. These studies examine the forms, frequency, and thriving correlates of purpose by surveying and interviewing cohorts of adolescents and emerging adults across the United States over several years. Thus, a focus on the features and outcomes of purpose is well established. A critical next step is to gain insight into the social supports of purpose and how these supports can be translated into educational practice.

The articles that follow discuss practical implications for supporting purpose. The key question addressed is what kinds of learning tools and experiences are most likely to foster positive purpose. This groundbreaking research is among the first to explicitly address the supports of youth purpose and to construct youth purpose interventions. Thus this volume presents the current state of the field on instructing for youth purpose and serves as a resource for researchers, policymakers, teachers, and other practitioners who are interested in promoting positive youth development and thriving.

Some of the articles are analyses of data collected through multiple waves of the Stanford youth purpose studies, and others are independent research developed in part through Stanford youth purpose award grants to the article authors. Each article uses the notion of purpose as an intentionally constructed, stable, and higher-order goal that is meaningful to self yet expressed in actions that have a positive impact on others. This idea of purpose is explicitly invoked by each of the authors in this volume and thus provides a backdrop for the study of purpose supports.

Sonia Issac Koshy and Jenni Menon Mariano’s review of research on purpose support and programs in the opening article reveals where rather large gaps in the youth purpose education literature lie. One might ask whether it is too early to review the literature on teaching for purpose given the dearth of current research on the topic that these authors find. However, they show how vital it is for educators to know about tools previously used to teach for purpose. They also highlight themes imperative for follow-up by researchers and educators. Indeed, several purpose programs have been used in the past, and although they are no longer in use, they can be replicated by practitioners today. Furthermore, the authors show that several strategies currently being used to teach for positive youth development in general can help lay a foundation for the formation of purpose.

Kendall Cotton Bronk next discusses how purpose supports, and is supported by, one specific feature of healthy adolescent development: the formation of identity. Cotton Bronk’s article, which focuses on psychological supports of purpose, also sets the stage for the remaining articles by illustrating pictures of young people who serve as purpose exemplars over a five-year period. Thus, an important and preliminary question is addressed for readers unfamiliar with the youth purpose construct: What does purpose look like in diverse groups of young people? Cotton Bronk presents portraits of purpose through vivid and stable examples, drawing from a group of young people nominated as purpose exemplars, and thus exhibiting positive youth purpose in its most glowing forms.

In the third article, Devora Shamah derives valuable insights from a study on supports of purpose among a sample of rural youth. This research shows that traditional out-of-school-time activities, community-based activities, and work experiences may all be important for developing a strong sense of purpose among this group. Shamah also suggests that lessons from these communities may be applied in urban and suburban communities.

The next three articles report outcomes of purpose interventions designed for formal educational settings differing by age level served. Practitioners can take concrete lessons from each of these articles and adapt them for use in their own educational settings. In article four, Bryan J. Dik, Michael F. Steger, Amanda Gibson, and William Peisner discuss an evaluation of their own self-designed purpose intervention for middle school students. They invoke the idea of work as greater purpose or calling in their purpose-centered career education intervention. Students engage in a three-module-lesson activity aimed at increasing four factors considered critical to the cultivation of purpose in the early stages of career development: identity, self-efficacy, metacognition, culture, and service to the greater good. Next, in the fifth article, Jane Elizabeth Pizzolato, Elizabeth Levine Brown, and Mary Allison Kanny examine the effectiveness of an intervention designed to promote purpose and internal control over academic success in high school students living in a low-socioeconomic-status community. Next, Matthew J. Bundick examines the benefits to college students’ goal directedness and life satisfaction that accrue from a one-on-one purpose discussion.

In each case, the authors of these three articles offer fresh approaches to their respective fields by centering their work on the purpose construct in ways that youth purpose researchers have not previously addressed. Dik and his colleagues incorporate instruction in service to the greater good, which is seldom incorporated in career development studies. Pizzolato and her colleagues apply the study of youth purpose to the achievement gap problem, showing that purpose is an important factor often missed in the literature around this issue. Bundick’s study fills a gap in intervention research by assessing the effects of a purpose intervention on later purpose and lasting purpose.

Altogether, the articles in this volume underscore several insights about supporting purpose that researchers and youth development practitioners will want to be aware of. First is the socially embedded nature of purpose support—embedded in the sense that multiple environments give rise to this support in adolescents’ lives, including in-school-time and out-of-school-time contexts. Shamah’s research highlights this theme, as does the work that Isaac Koshy and Menon Mariano review.

A second theme is that purpose support may be best facilitated across time. Educators cannot achieve sustained quality contact with all the students they will teach, however. Fortunately, the research shows that small and short-term interventions can be effective. This is important given the current high-stakes testing environment and the increasing class sizes that many schools have experienced. It is no wonder that, given these conditions, teachers feel that teaching for purpose constitutes an “extra,” a luxury, or goes beyond their training. Bundick highlights the user friendliness of a reflection and discussion approach to promoting purpose that does not require any advanced expertise and that students can be encouraged to use themselves. Thus, educators should take heart that they can successfully support students’ purposes through even short classroom intervals, as well as through long-term contact.

Finally, an important theme delineated in this volume is that youth from all walks of life experience purpose. Young purpose exemplars are diverse in age, ethnicity, academic achievement, and gender, and they take on a variety of causes, ranging from saving the environment to creating beautiful music. Instruction for purpose, whether formal or informal, can succeed for youth living in low-income communities, urban and rural environments, and those attending schools at different levels. As the article authors in this volume show, there are now a number of innovative approaches to instructing for youth purpose that are being studied, and these provide a platform on which researchers and practitioners can build. In the concluding article, Menon Mariano discusses specific ways that researchers, practitioners, and policymakers can build on the platform of these studies.

I thank Gil G. Noam and Erin Cooney for their support of this volume, as well as all the article authors. This work would not have been accomplished without the pioneering work of William Damon and the financial support for the initial youth purpose studies by the John Templeton Foundation, and the Thrive Foundation for Youth.

Jenni Menon Mariano

Issue Editor

JENNI MENON MARIANO is an assistant professor of educational psychology and human development at the University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee.

Sonia Issac Koshy, Jenni Menon Mariano

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. Furthermore, research on the outcomes of early purpose instruction curricula is not present in empirical journal articles. Nevertheless, a concern for fostering youth purpose has not disappeared from education; rather, it is subsumed under approaches that foster more comprehensive positive student outcomes, such as character, civic engagement, and positive youth development. Key curricular approaches to these outcomes are therefore also reviewed and examined for insights into how purpose can be fostered.

Chapter Two: The role of purpose in life in healthy identity formation: A grounded model

Kendall Cotton Bronk

Researchers contend that committing to an inspiring purpose in life is an important component of healthy identity development for adolescents; however, little research has focused on how identity and purpose develop together. Therefore, the study followed a sample of eight adolescent purpose exemplars for five years in order to develop a grounded model of the way these two constructs interact. Findings suggest that for adolescent purpose exemplars, the processes of identity formation and purpose development reinforce one another; the development of purpose supports the development of identity, and the development of identity reinforces purposeful commitments. Furthermore, in the adolescent purpose exemplars’ lives, the purpose and identity constructs largely overlap in such a way that what individuals hope to accomplish in their lives serves as the basis of the adults they hope to become. Implications of these findings are discussed.

Chapter Three: Supporting a strong sense of purpose: Lessons from a rural community

Devora Shamah