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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.
It's how we motivate adults at work so why not kids in school?
If it turns out to be a better use of resources and we turn out students who do better in school then it can't be all bad.
What does that teach them? Don't do anything regardless of what it is unless you're "bribed".
That said I know I will get flamed for saying that, but I think it instills an attitude of don't anything unless you get paid, loses touch with what education is and should be.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Who do you need to "bribe"? I never needed it, and it was offered, and I welcomed the cash ($2 per "A") but it never affected my performance in school. Obviously this can never work outside of a parents issued situation. But with attentive parents, this will, and has worked.
Can any economists comment? This actually makes a kind of sense. If you ask a kid to do some work (actually actively studying to rapidly learn IS work) you gotta pay em. Society would benefit quite a bit more than paying the kids would cost if the kids were to learn what they need to learn on a faster timescale. I'm positive that if the funding were there, kids of average intelligence could easily enter college at age 16 if they were to actually work hard at learning. I certainly was ready then.
pay them not to get pregnant! pit greed vs. breed.
They didn't have to pay us to be good, we were good for nothing.
I can see two main arguments for this and one against.
(+) "If it works, then why not?"
(+) "It's capitalism, comrade!"
(-) "But it's against our ideals, people should learn for the sake of learning!"
Frankly, I'm up for anything which improves the effectiveness of our education system at this point as long as it doesn't constitute an outright human rights violation. The system is broken. If you can prove that X provides significant gains, then we should at least look into it.
In Soviet Russia, bribes school YOU!
*ducks and runs from thread*
"A government is a body of people usually -- notably -- ungoverned." -Shepherd Book
The experiments so far indicate that paying students for results improves only the results paid for. Pay for attendance, you get attendance. Pay for grades on quizzes, you get grades on quizzes. End of year scores don't improve much, if at all. And when the money stops, so does the improvement.
That's useful info.
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.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
http://outcampaign.org/
What in the hell is wrong with this world when people get death threats over an issue like this?
death threats REALLY?!
*shakes his head*
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.
As adults we're motivated by money at every turn.
That said, it would be nice to be able to teach our kids that pure work ethics will do the job and give them their just compensation. It rarely works out that way though, unfortunately.
It would be even better for these people to find out why kids aren't doing well in the first place. It usually comes down to boredom or just plain horrible teachers.
Some of the worst teachers I've ever come across in my life were at the college level. There were some truly good teachers too, but they stand out only because they worked alongside awful teachers.
It's up to the parent to decide whether or not these bribes actually add to the overall success of their child in the long run. It will take some convincing for me to think this is likely. If success means being a privileged snot or a poor loser, so be it. If success means happiness, self-worth, longevity or value to society.. Well, that's not as simple as choosing between a stick and a carrot.
The results, which he shared exclusively with TIME , represent the largest study of financial incentives in the classroom — and one of the more rigorous studies ever on anything in education policy.
I was under the impression that research like this gets published in peer-reviewed journals, not in newspapers. Saying the study is rigorous and what the results are won't do you any good unless it's actually possible for others to verify those things.
Its called 'pay for performance'
(I think that bribe is not the correct term here.)
"He got death threats, but he carried on."
I mean, really? People got pissed because he gave money to kids and they did better? My first suspect is someone involved with teachers unions.
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
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
Psychological studies have shown that the field of psychology is full of shit.
extremely poor choice in words. if my kids ever end up going to public school, I could see paying them for each A. I'm hoping they don't want to go to public school though...
Well, I thought it was funny. I also don't carry most of my organs with me exactly for that reason.
DATABASE WOW WOW
The word, “bribe,” has two very different common meanings.
The first is a payment to somebody to do something illicit. It might or might not be something the person objects to doing, but it is something against the rules. A border agent might or might not think smoking pot is a good idea, but if you pay him to look the other way while you drive your “plant tissue samples” across the border, that’s a bribe.
The second, and the usage implied here, is a payment to somebody to do something they don’t want to do but which isn’t illicit. It’s especially applied to things that most people think the person should want to do without compensation but, for whatever reason, the person isn’t interested. If you offer to pay your spouse to fold the laundry, that’s often considered a bribe.
But, clearly, almost all paid work falls into the second category. While the work I do isn’t objectionable and pays well, there’s simply no way I’d do it unless you paid me (and paid me well). There are other things I’d rather do for money, but they don’t pay as well. And there are still other things I do and would do that either don’t pay or that I have to pay to do.
So, unless you think your boss is bribing you to go to work, or unless you’d happily give up your paycheck but still continue at your job, it is most hypocritical to call what’s described in this article a bribe. You might wish that students would put in maximum effort even if they don’t get a cash reward, but your boss wishes the exact same thing of you.
Whether or not paying students is an effective end economical method of turning them into honorable and effective citizens is a valid topic of discussion, but such payments are most emphatically not bribes.
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
That seems a little excessive.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
"Bribed" is so negative -- are these kids really getting corrupted? Has anyone actually done a study to find the effects of getting incentives for your work early, as opposed to shouting from their armchairs? Oh right -- this Harvard guy. Probably not you.
... is not data, blah, blah, blah. regardless, i have an example. my 10 y.o. nephew has done well throughout most of his elementary schooling, receiving mostly As. he does so because his parents are hard working and set a good example for him. he tries to please them, but he is also very defiant at times. a typical kid. he is not bribed. he has toys and diversions, but his mom makes sure there is homework time after school.
i understand generalizing can be useless, but i'll generalize anyway. i think, generally, a lot of the problems of students underperforming are caused by people who do a poor job at being parents. parents don't have to send their kid knowing how to do addition and subtractions, but their children should know that you can't go to school thinking you can walk into class yelling "where my baby mama at?". (that happened in middle school classroom i was teaching in.) i know some parents have a hard time finding time to watch their kid and make sure there is homework time. regardless, it's up to them to find a way. people have families, tutors exist and there are places that try to help.
"To stop the terrorists."
Yes, because kids are supposed to really understand that sitting in class for 12 years and learning will be really useful when they finish school and go to university or search for work. Yes, a 7 year old is supposed to understand that doing this boring stuff for an eternity (12 years by 7year olds standards) will be somehow useful.
Or maybe he just needs to do well enough so that the teachers don't yell at him and/or parents don't beat him up when he gets a bad mark. That could also make kids get good marks.
Studies show that adding pay to a task decreases the internal perceived motivation for that same task. Actors conclud, subconsciously, that money is why they did it. Hence they are less likely in the future to do it unless they are paid again. Perilous to do this with the pursuit of knowledge.
Of course in a typical public school, there are already serious problems with busywork versus genuine pursuit of understanding. In that context, payment might be the right thing to do, because as others have noted, payment is indeed what humans expect in exchange for busy work.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
According to the original article in one case someone was even paid for "going another day without getting pregnant".
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Should kids receive any immediate benefit for doing well in school? If so, why not money also? Or ice cream? Or a pony? I mean, if we should punish them for doing poorly, then why not reward them for doing well?
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
You live and undoubtedly get benefits from functioning in certain society. It's only reasonable that this society expects things in return; especially if those things (like getting a better educated members of it in the future) benefit the society.
One that hath name thou can not otter
I see a lot of people here saying that that's the way it works when you're an adult. This is true but I guess the way I see it is when you're an adult you have to support yourself and possibly a family as well; typically you don't have to do this when you're a kid. I'm in college now and the reason I pushed myself to do well in high school was because I knew by doing so I would eventually reap the rewards of working hard such as getting into a better college and likely a higher paying job. I think it's important for people to learn the value of hard work for more than just immediate gratification. Just my opinion though.
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!
Hmm, I was hospitalized three times before I was 8. All because of "clumsy" accidents that always seemed to leave out the part where my dad punched, kicked or beat me with some object or another. I have no problem even today with corporeal punishment, but too many folks don't understand a swat on the ass is OK, while breaking ribs, arms and hand bones is not OK.
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".
"Other kids got paid for making A's. If we didn't, we got to explain "Why Not?" My daughter was third in her class.
It's up to the parent to decide whether or not these bribes actually add to the overall success of their child in the long run. It will take some convincing for me to think this is likely.
OK, let me try that. I'm a parent of three kids, two of them in this age group. They're at a Dutch school, and receive grades four times a year, and I pay them an amount of money depending on their grades. Grades here in the Netherlands range from 10 (A, perfect) to 1 (F, couldn't be worse) with 6 being acceptable (C?). The oldest one receive €20,- for each 10, €10,- for each 9, while I get a 'discount' for everything below 6. My reasoning behind this is simple: while they're at school, I want them to consider this their 'work', that is, I want them to take it seriously. One way of showing them that this is serious to me is the same way is my boss does that to me: by paying for it. Of course it's not the only thing that we, trying to be responsible parents trying to give them a good start in life etcetera are doing; but it is one of them. It seems to work fine. The oldest is top of hist class (without being too snotty) and the youngest is about average, which, frankly, is above previous expectations, since he's simply less talented than his older brother (and therefore is payed slightly different too) . I know from personal experience that it motivates them to some extent, and there's another practical reason for doing this: they have a fair chance of making some pocket money without having to take a 'do you want fries with this' type of job that would certainly cost them a lot of time I'd rather have them spend on school work.
I realize this does in no way prove these payments will add to 'their overall success in the long run', but I'm convinced that, at least in our case, it does play a positive role in their chances of successfully finishing their school, probably with somewhat higher grades than they'd otherwise have had. Clearly it's not all you can do as a parent, but it is an option, and it can work out well. I'm not surprised research seems to support this at all.
Also, in general: is there any reason why a stick should be preferred over a carrot?
"Money is a sign of poverty." - Iain Banks
We told the kids that they would get $1 for each 0.1 GPA point, e.g. a 3.5 GPA would get you $35.00.
Straight As got you $40, plus I would buy you anything you want, within reason. The 'within reason' part helped develop negotiating skills, an important thing to have for any adult :-)
Once they figured out what money was, what a GPA was, and how to figure their wages, they were off and running.
The first kid graduated from HS and went into business for himself, he now has several employees and is a 'computer consultant' and wireless ISP provider. He owns his own house at age 30, something I was not able to do at his age.
The second kid graduated from college with degrees in Marketing, Business, and French, on a volleyball scholarship, spent two years in France pretty much working and is now married and living in Alaska.
The third kid dropped out of HS, plays the guitar, WoW, and works at Subway. He's 20something and lives at home.
The fourth kid graduated HS, works two jobs, has her own apartment, and wants to become a fashion consultant.
So I guess the money thing works as long as the student makes the connection between money and work :-)
To put a witty saying into 120 characters, jst rmv ll th vwls.
Even if I am posting on the internets and doing things of "higher profile", I was raised in borderline poverty, and I couldn't afford paid education like most people around me. The jobs I get are obviously too bad to afford it as an adult.
If this existed, more unfortunate kids would be able to get a way to pay for their own studies, without having to depend on their daddies being rich.
Heck I had fairly decent grades, I could have paid for actual textbooks at least and not cheap B&W copies. And I wasn't the only one, but the other poor kids mostly focused on being bullies and doing pot, they didn't give a shit already.
It really sounds good at first, and indeed may result in better school performance, as measured by grades. But the end goal should be that children are motivated to learn and challenge themselves. It is somewhat counter-intuitive, but significant research (we're talking about empirical studies here) has shown that when you get children to do what you want by using rewards and/or punishment (including money, grades, timeout, etc.), they will be less motivated and less successful as adults (by almost any definition of "success"). I learned this from this guy: http://www.alfiekohn.org/index.php. His books, particularly the more technical ones, describe numerous scientific studies.
Check out "Social Pathology" by Peter Joseph. http://vimeo.com/10707453
ayottesoftware.com
The first problem that I saw was in some of the schools that required that the payment for grades be held in a bank account, only to be paid in graduation for high-school. Very simply, that is too remote a reward for it to provide ample incentive. As the article later illustrated, students who received frequent reward were better motivated by the reward. It is no surprise that the system failed to produce significant results in the schools that made the reward distant.
A second failing in the experiment, it was pointed out that this motivation system was significantly more effective in raising boys results then those of girls. The facts are that the focus in school is in raising the results of girls relative to the boys. Thus, this program produces exactly the opposite of the desired political goal. It will be rejected.
The only reason why we all have work is to get paid to pay the bills... bribing or not that's how society works.
Any smart parent knows that no university gives a rat's ass about Junior's marks in grade 7. Encouraging children when they work hard will always produce better results than telling them that they are smart and rewarding high scores.
*** Don't be dull.***
For: School is a) not just for your own benefit, but good for society as a whole. Much of what you learn will never be useful to you. b) What you do learn is almost never useful immediately but instead becomes useful 10 years later. Anyone that studies teaching will tell you that it is best to provide an instant reward. Giving a dog a treat 10 minutes after he learns a trick does nothing, but if you give when he does it, he will learn the trick.
Or to simplify: Capitalism works better than Communism.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
TRANSLATION: I know a couple of people, OK one person, where that's the case.
It's a bit more than that. But my point was more that this is universal human behavior that can be seen by casual observation.
The correct question is "Should children be rewarded for doing well in school?" "Bribed" has severe negative connotations: its use is clearly intended to provoke hostility.
And the answer is "Yes".
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Who knew that sufficiently motivated kids could get good grades? What a stunner. It's absolutely mind boggling.
All this study does is point out the obvious. What it doesn't do is show how to teach students how to find reasons within themselves for getting good grades. As lack of self-motivation is the real problem standing between most kids and realizing their personal potential(both grade-wise and in life) that's where the studies should focus.
I remember Algebra class in high school. It wasn't all that hard, but I hated it as no one ever told me what it was good for, and I couldn't visualize any use for it. I ended up dropping it because I would have gotten a D in it, while I pulled straight A's in Geometry with hardly any effort on my part. The difference? My interest level. My internal motivation. I loved pulling out my Geometry book and going to Geometry class. I hated pulling out my Algebra book and going to Algebra class, even though I liked the teacher.
A decade later I entered a college technical course which required algebra skills for the electrical theory it taught. I aced both math and electrical courses as I finally finally saw what algebra was used for, and became motivated as I found electrical theory fascinating.
In my late 40s I went back to school again and aced math classes related to electronics that the college said I had no business even taking with my math background. Those classes combined algebra and trig, which I'd never studied at any level in school, but yet I breezed through them with minimal effort. My total exposure to trig before those classes? A small, and I mean small, trig textbook written in the late 1800s. It was approximately 4"x6" and about.5" thick, including the hard cover that I had spent maybe 4 or 5 hours total reading, but it made sense to me
We need to study how to motivate, how to get kids to understand how the skills taught in school will affect their life after school. Once they understand those things they will apply themselves as it's in their own best interest and they will recognize it. They aren't stupid, they're just taught more about political correctness, and that the world owes them, in school these days than they are about real life, how they can succeed, and what that success will mean to them in quality of life after school.
This study shows short-term motivation works. But what we really need is to understand how to encourage long-term motivation in our kids. Teaching them that they are entitled to the government taking care of them from the cradle to the grave isn't motivational in the least. It's demotivational, if that's actually a word. It teaches them that they can get by with the least effort possible, and that's a recipe for disaster-in-the-making for our country's long-term future. Why? If our kids aren't self-motivated to succeed, our country will fail right along with them.
"while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude." de Tocqueville
It seems we are breeding the next generation of investment bankers that will do things only for money. Economists tend to forget that people get used to their incentives and after a while feel entitled to them. In a few years these kids will be used to getting paid and will ask for more.
http://blog.ted.com/2009/08/the_surprising.php - basically intrinsic motivations works a LOT better than extrinsic motivation (aka money/bribes).
Getting good grades != Learning
Most of my time in public school was a complete waste from the education point of view. I learned how the world works (cheating, lying, etc), I learned social skills, and I observed things around me. Public school is not about education. It is about training. Go from point A to point B within X or we'll do Y. Seriously, the bell rings and the sheep rush to class. It reminds me of a corporate setting. I remember being punished for working on other classes during class time even though I was finished with the assigned material. When I said this, I was given more work. Once I was in high school my grades dropped (was about a 4.0 student before), and I literally learned nothing from my teachers. I would just read the books on my own time (quiet settings), ace the tests, and cheat on the pointless busy work. Now that I'm in college my GPA is back up to ~4.0.
'Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.' - Mao Tse-tung
I read on, but I really got skeptical at:
. The results, which he shared exclusively with TIME, represent the largest study of financial incentives in the classroom — and one of the more rigorous studies ever on anything in education policy.
So... these results, they are unvetted? Not published or peer-reviewed yet? In fact, it sounds rather like they aren't on their way to being peer-reviewed, even. Then again, either Fryer or the author has a fairly serious misunderstanding of what things were about, given the repeated statements to the effect of Fryer was setting things up "just like a real scientist." Either this is scientific or it isn't.
In many ways, this guy seems more interested in attention than in the validity of the results. (The article doesn't really help much. It's mostly a story told with Fryer as the hero and very little contrary view, although we're told he encountered resistance. Why? How much of that resistance was well-founded?)
Extrinsic motivators are good for at least 80-85% of the people on the planet.
How many people would actually work if they weren't paid and were able to survive at a mostly decent level of comfort? The intrinsically motivated don't care about external motivation, so concentrating on that it pointless. The problem is those that don't, not those that do.
"It's how we motivate adults at work so why not kids in school?" I read in an reply just a bit further up. Why not have children do pornography? Secondly, if money equals power, and absolute power corrupts absolutely; why do we want to send this message to the children when they are at an age of innocence. I don't mean to be vague with the initial rhetoric, but to me it's quite clear that schools are to be gone to for educational purposes. Also, how can one accurately teach that money is simply a tool to facilitate economic growth when the children will now be subjected to this scheme. Must we embed so deeply capitalism within our children when greed is arguably what's destroying this country? give me a break.
What did you do to prompt those beatings?
Just curious. Whatever it was, I bet you quit doing it.
I started to write 'To this day I don't know why drinking milk out of the jug is wrong, but I damn sure don't do it.' but the truth is that I didn't get beat for drinking milk out of the jug - I got beat for lying about it to my dad. So thirty years later I still drink milk out of the jug, but I damn sure don't lie about it (or anything else. Ever. It's actually a condition of my employment : I will never be asked to lie about anything to anyone.)
I'm not saying getting beat by our parents was a good thing, but here's to hoping we're better people as a result.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
Pretty much off topic, but don't underestimate the fiscal impact of a teen working a summer job flipping burgers for minimum wage or mowing lawns for $20 apiece.
Sure a recent college grad working a new job may make a solid $40k a year, but they are also paying a LOT of fixed costs (apartment, student loans, car payment, insurance, utility bills, grocery bills, etc.) - after all the fixed costs are paid it isn't unusual to hear that young adults working 'real' jobs are barely breaking even, or only have a few hundred ($100 to $400) each month in discretionary cash. A two month summer part time job paying minimum wage could leave your kid with $750 a month in discretionary cash, and even a part time job during the school year could score an easy $250-$500 a month in money they can spend on whatever they like (they would have more discretionary income than most people I know.)
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
He should also check if the kids develop social skills, like sharing and helping. I doubt that paying kids to be good at school is a great idea in that dimension. In addition, in most cases it help when you help their parents so they can care for them. This can be done by state money or nursery and kindergarden (and later with whole day schools). A very effective way to bring kids to learn things is, to work with their curiosity.
Back in the day (I'm 43) if I didn't do well is school my dad would whup my ass. That was all the incentive I needed!
Average spending per student in the USA is about eleven grand. Right now, we spend that on buildings, teachers' salaries, books, busses, administrators, janitors, etc.
I don't know about anyone else, but when I was a kid, if someone had offered me even a grand to go and find out what I needed to know to pass a set of grade-level qualifying exams, I'd do so with no need for further prompting.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Of course this works, why wouldn't it? If they are motivated, they will do something. This is not the type of motivation that they should be learning though, tell them WHY they should learn (much more specific then they do now) and maybe something will happen. School shells out enough money to pay for their education, better use for this money would be to pay for college for those who want it. I can tell you that paying kids to do this will diminish the intrest of those who would do it anyways. It turns this into a job and kids don't need a job yet. Kids who do this for the money will give you what you ask for (as a rule) and nothing more. I very much belive there are better ways to fix the education system, and the first thing to do is motivate the kids; not with money, but with a knowledge of why they are there, why they should try hard, and give them an intrest in learning. That is what will be best for the kids and for the country, not bribing them with money, that will just cause them to expect money for everything.
Isn't this kind of initiative what we decry as schools killing children's innate curiosity? Paying kids for grades is as much as stating that learning has no inherent value.
I do recognize that my supporting philosophical objection results in many children not achieving as much as they could. I am not happy with that. So if these kind of payment schemes increase scores, then I guess I'm for them. I just wonder what we're giving up in exchange. I want a market economy, not a market society.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
The motivators won't become extinct because these are exactly the external motivators these kids will get in the workforce. If there was an easy and cheap way to instil "love of learning" we would already be doing it. Behaviourists would also argue that, outside of the handful of biological urges, intrinsic motivators are the result of conditioning anyway. Most adults don't do a job because they love it, they do it because they need to pay the bills. And that is a good thing because there are plenty of boring or shit jobs that hardly anyone would do for the love of it.
========
CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
The people who are offended by this clearly have never taught in a public school. I taught humanities in NYC for years, and I can say from experience that a lot of kids will not do a lick of schoolwork without a reward of some kind promised to them. Paying kids for their output could easily be one of the most efficient ways to boost test scores, graduation rates, and get kids doing schoolwork.
And isn't that what modern education is all about? Since Skinner and Dewey proved without a doubt that learning and behavior are the same thing, all we have to do is find a way to get kids to complete their homework, take their tests, and do as their told. So what if their intrinsic motivation is killed and their personal values are replaced with invoices? So what if they develop a contempt for education?
Kids need to know that if someone is not promising cold hard cash, it ain't worth doing. The most important lesson we can instill is that learning is painful, boring, and a waste of time unless you can swing a new iPod or DS game out of it. Schools have done an excellent job of instilling this for decades now, but again, just saying, "F*** it, let's just pay the little sh**s," is far more efficient.
I support this entirely. Let's do away with the farcical pretense that school is about learning and that education has inherent value. Compulsory mass government schooling is already premised as such and explicitly behaviorist. If we're going to use operant conditioning and treat kids like rats in a maze, let's at least do it honestly and intelligently.
What a shock, people actually work harder for money than they do when it's forced labor.
A preference for sticks says nothing about the recipient but plenty about the administrator. It's not so much about efficacy of methods because positive incentives work better. It's about being basically a bully and using parental authority and the need to meet the responsibility of schoolwork as justifications and excuses for it. It's not natural for anyone to think like that, but it's acquired so early in life that it seems this way. By their example, these parents are teaching this mindset to their children who are unlikely to recognize it for what it is and reject it.
As a sort of analogy, I'll give you a completely unrelated phenomenon that nevertheless works the same way. You are driving and someone gives you the middle finger on the highway. You get angry at the insult as an automatic response, like a reflex. It doesn't seem like something you're choosing because you can't do otherwise and you'd probably rather not be upset. Consider that anger is part of the fight-or-flight response; you could say it's the "fight" portion.
It engages your adrenaline glands and triggers all sorts of changes in the body, all designed to make you physically ready to respond to a legitimate threat. The distant sight of a finger is not a legitimate threat for which you need physical preparation. Yet it seems so natural to react this way. I don't believe that the fight-or-flight system of every last person is hyperactive or otherwise faulty. I believe this is learned behavior. That means two things: it is contagious, and it can be understood and replaced with superior learning.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Yeah because all we need is your parents choosing your path in life FOR YOU.
"I want my child to be a musician! I don't care if he is terrible at it!"
The government is in control of public education. They don't choose your path in life for you. Why do you think giving parents drastically more control over education would automatically amount to choosing your path in life for you? It stands to reason that the parents would care about their children a lot more than a bureaucrat, teacher, or other paid professional.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
From the article:
"""
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. Sometimes that's true. But a lot of the time, people are just flying blind. John List, an economist at the University of Chicago, has noticed the disconnect in his own education experiments. He explains the problem to me this way: "I could ask you to solve a third-order linear partial differential equation," he says. "A what?" I ask. "A third-order linear partial differential equation," he says. "I could offer you a million dollars to solve it. And you can't do it." (He's right. I can't.) For some kids, doing better on a geometry test is like solving a third-order linear partial differential equation, no matter the incentive.
"""
If the kids really don't know how to learn, then how do we expect them to learn regardless of incentives? What kind of messed up education system produces students that don't know how to learn? How can we fix this problem?
... Do the kids care? That's the real problem. If the kids don't care, then just after there exams, the knowledge gained is going to disappear. I saw this with just about everyone I went to University with (and I was in Physics and Maths!).
This is the real problem with "education research". Namely, they rely *way* too much on numbers and not even close to what they should be looking at such as, whether the kids actually understood the material (because lets be honest, tests today are memorize and regurgitate), and whether they are inspired to know more (or at least find it interesting) i.e. tests don't test what they should be testing.
Ediie Murphy still makes absolutely crappy movies, and they still keep paying him! :)
On the serious side...I think this is good. I was an intelligent kid with absolutely no motivation. Paying me might have made me exceed earlier (I did eventually become successful, but I wasted a lot of years)
When are we going to see an incentive scheme for Slashdot posts?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Back in the 70's, we were told that there were serious problems with the American diet. Fat was seen as the culprit. In that context, eliminating fat from our diet seemed like the right thing to do, because humans expected that fat in their diet was what made them fat.
Fast forward 30+ years, and we realized that we made a big mistake. Scientists overlooked information that they believed was irrelevant at the time, and instead manipulated statistics in a way to make fat evil and carbs king. Politicians jumped on board with the change, and private industries capitalized on these lies. Looking back on it all, we were wrong, and we're paying for it with the worst obesity epidemic in our nation's history. And now, it looks like we're setting ourselves up for failure all over again.
As a public school teacher, I just shake my head in disappointment when I read these comments. And when I tried to read the article, my disappointment grew even further with only one paragraph in:
In junior high school, one of my classmates [named "Ethan"] had a TV addiction...Then one day Ethan's mother made him a bold offer. If he could go a full month without watching any TV, she would give him $200. None of us thought he could do it. But Ethan quit TV, just like that. One month later, Ethan's mom paid him $200. He went out and bought a TV, the biggest one he could find.
Exactly. Mom tries to motivate her son to stop watching TV. What does son do? He takes the bet, goes one month w/o TV, gets paid, then buys his own TV. Someone please tell me, what was the moral of this story?!? Because, it sure as hell isn't, "Monetary rewards permanently change child behaviors." Just listen to what this other student says at the end of the article: Then I ask her about the psychologists' argument that she should work hard for the love of learning, not for short-term rewards. "Honestly?" she asks. "Yes, honestly," I say. She looks me dead in the eye. "We're kids. Let's be realistic." This is the attitude we are nurturing if we let this idea take flight. And these attitudes about "What's in it for me?" will shape our society for decades to come. How would you like to be stuck in a nursing home, unable to feed yourself, bedpan overflowing, and a worker just look at you, waiting to receive something from you for the work he has to do?
This "expert" seems to complain about the lack of motivation that exists in our schools. "Kids should learn for the love of learning," he says. "But they're not. So what shall we do?" Hmm, how about figure out why they don't love learning anymore? Is that too hard a question to answer? Because, what this guy is suggesting is equivalent to shooting up patients with morphine to treat any and every kind of pain. You're quelling a symptom but not ever finding the cure.
Every single study on psychology and behavior has been absolutely conclusive about extrinsic (monetary) rewards: the behaviors do not change permanently, but the attitudes do. We need to stop letting politicians and businesses with vested interests in "reforming" public education beguile the ignorant masses into believing, as we did with "fat" back in the 70's, that so-called "common-sense" ideas are the best ones. Please trust your local school leaders and personnel into making the decisions that are best for your schools. After all, to use a somewhat-related idea, who would you rather trust with your health care...your local doctor, or your national government?
What a balanced article title. It makes "positive reinforcement" sound downright evil. I suppose dogs should just train themselves because the trainers just say so and its the "right thing to do."
Knowledge For The Sake Of Itself
Born: Mists of time
Died: 2010
Rest In Peace
I took special note of that section as well. It appears to me that it didn't incentivize the kids to learn more for the sake of knowledge or their future, but rather, toward acquiring more skill at gaming the system so they could earn more in the short term.
This isn't the first time such a project has been conducted. I read about a similar inner-city program from 20+ years back, that paid kids to stay in school and earn good grades. Turned out that even those who stayed in school and got paid the most, wound up being losers just as often as the unpaid kids. Five years later they were no better off; under 15% had gone on to make anything worthwhile of their lives.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Do adults do their jobs because "they are supposed to" or "out of the kindness of their own hearts."
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.
and expect them to do it for free.
Why not give them something they enjoy to do? Or at least compensation for it? I learned so much in my 6th grade math that the only thing I learned about in 8th grade math was matrix multiplication. I didn't learn anything in 7th grade math.
So I got in trouble all the time for talking to friends, goofing off, whatever. And they wondered why I was so misbehaved. Disciplined me hard and I got scared of talking at all. Now I just talk to myself and am afraid of talking out in groups.
I firmly believe effort is a flawed metric because the human brain adapts remarkably well. I remember how out of the box some of my freshman level classes were. Now they're easy cake. I skated along with B's and C's the whole time and they've still turned into cake-- with or without my effort.
Reward results. You reward results and people will be more motivated to try harder. That motivation adds up and the brain adapts, and they get that reward eventually.
Alternatively we try to reward people who look like they're trying hard. It's hard to tell if someone is trying hard, don't grownups work 40 hours a week to disguise that they're only working 15?
No such thing as intrinsic motivator, duh, welcome to thermodynamics. We default to laziness.
what if we removed all -1 moderation options and only had +1's?
I'd tolerate the spam (or just browse at 2) to avoid the mod abuse.
Story starts off with "Then one day Ethan's mother made him a bold offer. If he could go a full month without watching any TV, she would give him $200". But then the kid went out and bought himself another TV. Great, now you've got an even bigger problem.
I'm a parent of two and I have a much better solution. I simply tell my kids that if they don't turn that TV off when I tell them to, their TV privilege is revoked for a week. If that doesn't work (and it's never failed me), there's always a good old fashion swat on the rear. I also don't buy any kind of TV service so it makes it much easier to control how much TV the kids watch. There's no computers in their room so they're not in there by themselves playing with the computer all day. It's absolutely amazing how well this works and how much cheaper it is. Only in America are parents so stupid to have to bribe their kids.
Oh but there already is a great pay day for school. It's the greatest pay day of all and we're talking about 6-figure jobs that involve relatively easy work. The problem is delayed gratification and most people want their gratification now. They prefer the instant gratification of watching TV, playing with the computer, being cool with the other kids, etc.
http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/inmotiv.htm
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
For my senior year, I got $10 per A on my report cards. Yeah! Except I hated nearly every class except Latin and calculus. So in my case, the reward was more like, Only 2 A's, you could have done better. But here's 20 bucks, go wild. Which might be why, 20 years later, I'm commenting snarkily on /. Or at least a contributing factor.
There is simply too much glass..
It doesn't fucking matter if it "loses touch with what education should be" - all that matters is RESULTS.
In that case forget the money. It has long been shown that negative feedback works far better for motivating learning than positive pats on the back (determined from experiments along the lines of 'get a question wrong and you get a small electric shock'). So if you really want results and care about nothing else then this is clearly the way to go....of course most of us would have serious problems with this approach. From this we can conclude that results are not the only thing that matters for the vast majority of us when it comes to education: we want our kids to have fun, have a chance to explore new ideas, find out what subjects they like (and hate!) etc. Neither of which are achieved by either paying them or shocking them.
all that matters is RESULTS
Totally agree.
Results certainly matter but to the exclusion of all else, really? To take your mechanic example suppose the effective one had had a miserable experience at school, hated being a mechanic but was extremely good at it vs. the incompetent one who really should not be a mechanic but loved learning about it at school, had a wonderful time there and loves his job (lets assume he is not quite as terrible as you make out otherwise he would not be a mechanic for too long!).
Clearly as a customer you want the very unhappy but extremely competent guy....but if you were the mechanic's parent which child would you want? Cramming information into a brain is not the only thing we want out of an education - we want the process to be enjoyable and engaging as well and lead to people who are happy doing what they do. So while it is an interesting experiment don't fool yourself that results are the only thing that anyone cares about with education - although it might be nice if people cared about results more.
... if someone bribes the children and there is no team of researchers around to analyze the effects, the children will just bribe teachers for better grades.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
... "rewards". Not necessarily money, but something that kids do enjoy like games or toys. An incentive to meritocracy, which seems to be lacking in our society these days.
Seeing as we have pretty much removed the stick, the carrot may be worth a try. Without trying to sound like a curmudgeon....when I was in school (in the 80s) we would have been suspended or paddled for a large majority of things kids get away with in today's public schools. From my personal experience, a HUGE proportion of "under preforming" students just don't take school seriously. While not always the case, this is often because their parents aren't doing their jobs at home. Teacher to parent: "Brian hasn't turned in ANYthing for 2 weeks. If we don't get him to start taking his education seriously, he's going to fail this class." Parent's response: "I just don't know what to do with him. He's always out with his friends, and I can never get him to do his homework." ...grow a pair and take some responsibility.
Public schools are faaaaaar from perfect, but they're caught, in that they can only react to external problems...and with a dwindling set of tools.
Wow, then even the kids in third world countries can make money, as kids in US will outsource the homework while they enjoy the PS3/Wii/Xbox or just slack around.
--whacky
From the article... $2.00 for reading a book (in 2nd grade) and completing an online quiz about it seems more like "micro motivation" to me than "cash".
There's that guy who's not grading anymore, but instead is awarding experience points to his students.
Meaningful grades come only at test (not quiz) time and quarter/semester milestones. Experience points or cash are uniformly valued across the entire school term. Each is as important as the other and you can track your long term goals against these "short term rewards" every time you're given a short term reward. Traditional grades require more thought. Miss a homework assignment? "Oh well.. all the homework together only accounts for 10% of my grade so what's the harm in missing one homework assignment?"
Every year there's a new research story out on how kids lack the brain development to properly judge long term incentives and consequences. IMHO the traditional grading system requires precisely that same understanding of long term incentives to motivate the kids. Is it really a surprise that a grading system that provides short term rewards and is also aligned with the long term goals of education is more effective than the current system?
I was one of the "bright" kids -- apparently, anyways. What they either didn't know, or didn't deem necessary to tell me, was that I had ADD. Consequently I was unmedicated (parents didn't believe in that sort of thing, but that's another story) and struggled in the chaotic large class-sizes of a public school, and ended up in a private school 4th through 8th grades. Private schools tend to have the polar extremes of kids -- both the exceptionally bright (which I could be, when kept focused and interested) and the ones with learning disabilities and behavioural problems. I can but assume that this did and still does exist in public schools, perhaps to a greater extent because of the larger number of students overall. IN my experience, doing well in class, testing well, and getting good grades would actually attract the ire of the ones who don't/won't/can't learn well, who use it as an excuse to hate -- and subsequently harass -- students who do well for themselves. In my case there was no system of rewards from the school or teachers beyond their praise for a job well done. I can but assume that if this system of monetary rewards was instituted as a policy in a school system that it would sooner or later drive a wedge between the students who do well and the students who don't do well no matter what carrot you dangle in front of them -- and that it would likely lead to more harassment and violence between students. I have no doubt that in the short term it would have a positive effect, but in the long run it would just make a bad situation worse; it's putting yet another band-aid on an infected, festering wound. If the current "reforms", such as they are, are not working, then by all means try something else, but I don't think bribing them is the ultimate answer.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
It irks me when people compare working for wages or going to school to slavery.
So, you stop working and... What? You're free to do so... No?
Deleted
We pay adults to work hard anyway. Not paying kids for their work is age-based discrimination
One kids Bribe is another kids Reward. What makes it a Bribe? and Not a Reward? There is always a Bribe/Reward, 'do well this term and we'll visit some theme park', 'these grades are great, let's get fast-food tonight', 'can't you work harder in class? no TV for a week'.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
There's a name for the pitfall risked by this strategy: overjustification effect.
...sure...
so, children are meant to "learn for the joy of learning"?
are you on drugs? are they good drugs? they sound good..
oh, or are the children you speak of on drugs? that would explain a lot. A couple of grand a year for Ritalin, instead of a couple of tens or hundreds in incentives makes a LOT of sense.
I had no motivation in school. I did ok at the classes I liked, failed the ones I didn't. I ended out dropping out 18 months before graduation.
I got myself into college out of a motivation to never have another menial job. I got into medicine out of desire to no never again work as an engineer (and, hey, it seemed like a good idea at the time).
I now have 5 tertiary qualifications and am a medical doctor. If I have any say in the matter, I'll never leave university (getting PAID to LEARN!!! HELL YEAH!!!)
If you had told me this 15 years ago, I would probably have either tried to stab you in the throat or said "that sounds like a good future.. I hate it here".
Children are the ultimate pragmatists. they also have the most profound sense of "fairness".
they get bullied at school, punished by teachers who are burned-out, their parents work 70 hour weeks, they never seen their parents and said parents never seem to care unless they screw-up. You expect them to LIKE it? to work without tangible goals? you want them to suffer through all of this with NO rewards? in all honesty, WHAT IS IN IT FOR THEM? the only time they get attention is if they are bad and ignored if they are good.
You are essentially punishing and imprisoning them WITH NO COMPENSATION! let them draw the parallels between reading books/behaving/going to school and getting the money for a new bike or computer game, HELL.. YOU SHOULD ENCOURAGE IT!!! Then drop the bombshell on them: "This has just been a game. If you do the same thing as an adult, you could be a DOCTOR, or an ASTRONAUT, or EARN AND BUY ANYTHING YOU WANT!!"
Think of it like this: they draw the line between effort and reward. They do work and get money.. just MAYBE they will get the idea that working hard = one day owning two mercedes and a mansion..
If you went back and had to endure what your kids do every day, you WOULD kill someone. YOU ARE NOT AS TOUGH OR RESILIENT AS YOUR KIDS, you simply don't comprehend the stressors that keep them in a perpetual state of panic. Yet you expect them to do it "because they must", nay.. "because they must WANT to"... wow, you must have some AWESOME drugs...
Parents want to "invest in their future", but have no interest past throwing money ("time" is too precious to give to a kid). The time:money exchange rate has been getting worse. Now they're getting choosy about what happens to the money... WTF..
Suggest that parents should not beat their kid, should spend more time with them, PRETEND to take an interest, play sport with them rather than dump them in-front of the TV... I've been yelled at to "stop trying to tell me how to raise my kid" and "I can't do that, I'm too busy", like a first-time parent (or even a 10th-time parent) is some kind of expert... just because you successfully put Rod P in Slot V without using a gasket doesn't make you an expert, it does not give you some kind of intrinsic knowledge.. it makes you a learner like the rest of us.
Emotional intuition does NOT trump years of experience, success and failure. Emotional intuition does NOT trump scientific rigour and quantified results. Just because you feel "it is a profound truth, I feel it deep in my soul" does not make you RIGHT, it makes you IGNORANT AND BLIND when someone challenges your preconceptions. Maybe that scientist/teacher/nurse/doctor/shrink/cop/judge/prison-warden/cell-mate-butch-who-thinks-you-have-a-purty-mouth DOES know better "how to raise your damn kid"
An emotional investment simply gives you another avenue to try and best help your kids through the trauma that is 12 years of unrewarding, institutionalising, hard labour.
Two final remarks:
1. If you reward them if they are good and punish them
You're saying we should pay them to NOT read books?
This country's education system is in a sad state. It seems nothing ever gets done anymore unless something is in it for those involved. I find it a bit ironic actually that school after school is getting budget cuts so hindering that even teachers are getting thrown out right along side after-school programs and unneccesary office stationary, and in some cases the entire schools are being shut down, but money is being found to pay the students for doing what they're supposed to be doing anyway. I wonder if maybe the teachers as well are lacking the motivation to even teach anymore. Having to face all these students who are expecting a reward every time they do anything. I would find it hilarious if students and teachers started to compare how much they we're being paid to be there. Are these the values we really want to instill in our youth? Do we really want vision and drive to be blinded by a dollar bill? I foresee capitalism crumbling under the very ideals that created it in the first place.