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Should Kids Be Bribed To Do Well In School?
theodp writes "Harvard economist Roland Fryer Jr. did something education researchers almost never do: he ran a randomized experiment in hundreds of classrooms in Chicago, Dallas, Washington, and New York to help answer a controversial question: Should Kids Be Bribed to Do Well in School? He used mostly private money to pay 18,000 kids a total of $6.3 million and brought in a team of researchers to help him analyze the effects. He got death threats, but he carried on. His findings? If incentives are designed wisely, it appears, payments can indeed boost kids' performance as much as or more than many other reforms you've heard about before — and for a fraction of the cost."
yes.
pay them not to get pregnant! pit greed vs. breed.
The question shows a bias. Of course, we need to pursue the most effective and efficient methods to reach a goal, even if they're counter-intuitive.
For instance, San Francisco has found that anyone who believes in cost cutting should support paying homeless people to live in an apartment. Opponents may unjustifiably paint giving apartments to people who don't "earn" them as immoral--or even justifiably worry about providing an incentive to stay on public assistance. However, evidence has shown that when the homeless are given their own apartments rather than forcing them to live in homeless shelters, they don't run up six-digit emergency room bills.
Similarly, we should encourage and pursue whatever encourages young people to do well in school, whether social norms, peer pressure, or cash. Otherwise, our friends in Europe, Japan, South Korea, China, and the rest of the Developed or Developing world will soon pass us by.
Blatantly behaviorist. Extrinsic motivators are easily extinguished. We need to find and nurture intrinsic motivators. Unfortunately, this is hard, and the educational establishment is looking for easy solutions. Go read "Punished by Rewards" by Alphie Kohn
If done right, this might not be a bad idea. The traditional education system in the US has changed a lot in the past 50+ years:
Adding another carrot to the arsenal can't be too bad, given all the problems students face now.
Its called 'pay for performance'
(I think that bribe is not the correct term here.)
The thing I love about this is someone actually did science in education. That's extremely cool. Normally education comes down to one person arguing with another with little to no evidence, and the whole things just winds up being an argument that's really about values, political opinions, or personal opinions, but purports to be about outcomes. "Thing Y won't work because thing Y is "bad" or "Thing X won't work because it conflicts with my religion and/or political viewpoint" or "Thing Z will work because I think it will". From a scientific viewpoint these could all be viewed as untested theories. That's not necessarily bad.. but continuing to argue about them and not doing the experiment is... well stupid.
Richard Feynman talked about this 25 some years ago in one of his books. IIRC his main point was how teaching is ruled by "method of the day" as if it's just fashion, but very rarely does anything bother to find out what actually works.
So, now we have a good reason to suspect that some form of rewards for learning actually do seem to work. That doesn't mean the values argument is invalid, but it certainly does show the values argument for what it is and not a hidden attempt to discredit the validity of the outcome.
AccountKiller
I was a fuck up growing up. G&T,AG,HAG etc, but hated them all. I would rather skip class and smoke, shoot dope and drink. I ended up being sent to the fuck up school, called Optional Education. You came to school any time between 7am to 8pm. You had a full set of classes, but you could go to any of your classes at any time. You punched a time card in and the teachers signed off on them as you came to class and when you left. You could, and this was back in the early 80s, eat, drink, listen to music with headphones and smoke in class. You worked at your own pace, and it was set up so that you could test out of any set of assignments. I went from the 9th grade to graduating in a year and a half. Which allowed me to graduate with the rest of the people I started school with, even though I had failed the 9th grade twice because of skipping and suspensions. But over the years they changed the system and made it more like a school with guards, with assigned classes, scheduled classes etc etc. The school's graduation and student promotion rate plummeted. And disciplinary problems went through the roof. There is a lesson there, but I don't think I need to lay it out for you.
how about this: if every student gets an A, then everyone gets an equal share of the money... if anyone doesn't get an A, then no one gets any money and it is refunded to tax payers.
That will simply end badly. A 'young anarchist' or a 'rich kid' who wants to screw the other kids can cost the others who 'worked hard' to earn their share; Ralphie Wiggam can be in your class and you're screwed; some bullies will threaten marginal kids who will then fail due to fear and stress; etc. Give them all a "bonus" if everyone gets at least a "C"? Sure. A better bonus for better average grades? OK. All or nothing? That always ends with 'nothing'.
if we know that all "C" students are really just "A" students who haven't been sufficiently greased to do the required work, then what's the motivation of society to make that happen? are the children any more useful to society because they completed more busy work in elementary school to get a few extra gold stars to increase their letter grade?
I understand that you aren't thrilled with the idea of paying/motivating kids to get good grades. And I respect your position as a parent and a tax payer. But if you think it's just the "A" or "gold stars" that a child gets from doing the "busy work" then you're missing the point. The better they do on tests, and the better their homework is, the more they have learned.
... and if it does they can all go work on Wall Street.
I don't really like the idea that we need to pay kids to get their workload done, but why not try it? I do see that it could turn out a crop of the most selfish, money focused, narcissistic adults we've ever seen
No, it's more subtle than that, if you give them money to get good grades, it doesn't improve their standardized test scores at all. As someone else said, bribing them to get good grades is just bribing them to kiss up to the teacher.
BUT when they paid the kids to do things that you need to do to learn, like read, or attend class, the standardized test scores improved, even after the bribes stopped. This is great stuff to know. To continue all we need to do is figure out what it takes for kids to learn, and give them money to do that. Of course, there should be studies to see how well it works out in the long term, too.
Which is the greatest thing about this, it marks a change in education, for the better. How often have you heard people spouting off about, "the best way to teach kids is this!" for some ideology or another? How often have you heard of them actually running real experiments to test their theories? Not often enough, that's for sure. Hopefully we get more of this.
Qxe4
While teaching 9th grade science in the 1970's I decided to see what would happen if I started paying $5 for the highest grade on weekly tests.
Kids who were normally making C's and D's suddenly began getting A's and taking the $5. The kids which normally got A's didn't do as well.
I was accused of being a Communist. My response was that they were working for money, why can't their kids.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
In Montessori there are no grades, but rather detailed itemizations of proficiency in each exercise combined with qualitative evaluations by the guide.
Although not trained in Montessori, the author and speaker Alfie Kohn is famous in the Montessori community for his book "Punished by Rewards" and others. See his YouTube, "It's bad news if students are motivated to get A's".
paying kids for books read increased standardized test scores
It also instills the value that you shouldn't read unless you're being paid to. This is a well known downside, covered in most behavioral / developmental psychology degree programs.
A similar drawback exists for standardized tests themselves as well as technical certificate testing. The testing rarely translates into significant real-world problem solving abilities. As with pay-for-study the instruction becomes valued for it's immediate result and tends to have a negative effect on learning. See also research on deferred gratification and planning horizons.
In short, like deficit spending, it trades a small short-term payoff for a relatively large long-term handicap.
I'm not sure if many people read TFA but an interesting result:
Schools in Dallas got the simplest scheme and the one targeting the youngest children: every time second-graders read a book and successfully completed a computerized quiz about it, they earned $2. Straightforward -- and cheap. The average earning would turn out to be about $14 (for seven books read) per year.
And in Dallas, the experiment produced the most dramatic gains of all. Paying second-graders to read books significantly boosted their reading-comprehension scores on standardized tests at the end of the year -- and those kids seemed to continue to do better the next year, even after the rewards stopped.
The cheapest program produced the best results.
One clue came out of the interviews Fryer's team conducted with students in New York City. The students were universally excited about the money, and they wanted to earn more. They just didn't seem to know how. When researchers asked them how they could raise their scores, the kids mentioned test-taking strategies like reading the questions more carefully. But they didn't talk about the substantive work that leads to learning. "No one said they were going to stay after class and talk to the teacher," Fryer says. "Not one."
We tend to assume that kids (and adults) know how to achieve success. If they don't get there, it's for lack of effort -- or talent.
I do my job because I love it.
I've been offered more money (sometimes *much* more) to do something else. Each time, I turned it down.
So you're getting paid in "enjoyment and a little money" rather than "a lot of money". Big deal - you are still being motivated by your pay.
Don't tell me to get a life. I had one once. It sucked.
You might want to read the article. It states quite clearly that paying kids for books read increased standardized test scores on reading and that these were long term gains
Which actually makes a lot of sense. Reading is a skill, which must be developed by practice. If the children read more, they develop their reading skill more, and that higher skill level will provide an advantage to them in the future (potentially, for their entire life).
The problem isn't that children don't "love to learn". They do. It's natural for them. The problem is that children don't "love to learn" the subjects that adults think are important. If paying them as a mean to direct their learning in the direction we want it to go works, then I say go for it.
Don't tell me to get a life. I had one once. It sucked.
http://blog.ted.com/2009/08/the_surprising.php - basically intrinsic motivations works a LOT better than extrinsic motivation (aka money/bribes).
For the last year and a half of undergrad I had a job working at the local television station. For $5 an hour (about 1.5x minimum wage, pretty good at the time) 40 hours a week - I was doing pretty good for myself. The position essentially boiled down to watching TV 8 hours a day (it was a little more technical than that, but the technical part became second nature and I was basically watching TV 8 hours each day.)
When I graduated and got a 'real job' and went off into the real world ... I stopped watching TV. Nobody was paying me to watch TV, so why would I watch TV for free? Seemed stupid to me for people to watch television for hours at a time, for free.
Envision the practical applications of this theory - paying someone briefly for undesirable behavior, then stop paying them - they won't do that any more.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
why do you think adults require motivation?
If I wasn't being paid to work, I certainly wouldn't be doing it. Playing with the kid is much more fun, heck watching TV is more fun. There's a bunch of my own stuff I'd like prefer to do as well.