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.
In theory, purpose has implications for fostering good character, yet almost no research considers this proposition. This study examined character strengths in interviews with eight adolescent and young adult purpose exemplars and with informants who know them well. Most mentioned, general, typical, and variant strength occurrences were compared between purpose exemplars ( n = 8) and their informants ( n = 16). The groups agreed on prevalence of some strengths, but exemplars reported a much broader range of virtues to characterize their experience, with greater emphasis on virtues requiring maturity, such as wisdom, temperance, and transcendence, as well as strengths pertaining to inquisitiveness. The study supports associations of purpose with single character strengths but also aligns with the unitary view of character.
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