The front page of this morning’s New York times carried a loony story.
Next Question: Can Students Be Paid to Excel?
The fourth graders squirmed in their seats, waiting for their prizes. In a few minutes, they would learn how much money they had earned for their scores on recent reading and math exams. Some would receive nearly $50 for acing the standardized tests, a small fortune for many at this school, P.S. 188 on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
Let me answer that: NO.
Money does not provide positive reinforcement.
Source: Business Balls (highly recommended resource)
Positive motivators are achievement, recognition, responsibility, and growth. What people find unsatisfying are things like bad administration, bad teachers, and bad study conditions.
Disagree? What if money did motivate behavior in these students? Imagine the day when the money stops. Do we want to create students who refuse to learn unless they are paid? School is supposed to prepare people for life. It’s bad enough that the administration in Washington finds test scores more important than learning; it’s criminal for teachers and principals to game the system at our children’s expense.
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Sorry, Jay, you’ve got to go deeper than this. There’s research on rewards on learning behavior, and while there is an initial drop-off after stopping the rewards, the baseline does return and there are lasting benefits.
Not that I’m advocating a reward system like this, it’s a pretty shoddy way of showing that the culture really does value learning. However, when you don’t have parents modeling it and it’s not seen in the community, you may need an extrinsic system.
Clark, I have the utmost respect for your judgment, so I’d be happy to learn more (assuming you pay me.
)
While tangible rewards may have a longterm effect, wouldn’t you agree that achievement and recognition far outweigh their impact? Schools should experiment with the wholesome techniques exhaustively before before bribing children to pass tests.
Or course, there’s another issue to consider. Since real life doesn’t have standards tests, what are schools preparing students for?
Jay, you’ll have to live with my respect, as I can’t afford to pay you
.
I totally agree that we should find better ways, but looking at the wretched state of education in this country I’m not optimistic. I’m suspecting that this was the only consistent way that they could show the kids that learning is valued, sad as that would be. And if I’m wrong, they have buggered it up.
And you’re right, it’s likely that the learning that’s being valued isn’t really valuable. No Child Left Untested…
Clark, we agree. Sad but true.
we don’t have to pay people to learn we just need to make learning more interesting. or, more accurately, we need to make kids think they are learning, but entertained like they were watching movies. give a kid a book and he’ll find a place to put it. give a kid a movie or something on a iPod and watch how fast he loads in the TV or begins to scroll through the iPod. there is a site that is trying to make entertaining education: the Adam Smith Academy:
http://www.adamsmithacademy.org