Should Kids Be Paid to Do Well in School?

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1978589-4,00.html

by keltecp11 • 16 years ago

11 31 16 years ago

keltecp11• 16 years ago

There have been a lot of studies about this lately... if you think yes, why? Is it because kids today do not necessarily need teachers for answers like kids in generations past (due to the internet?)

If you think 'no' is it because you think it is a bad example? It doesn't 'seem right'? How would you fix education?

erreon• 16 years ago

I don't know about the paycheck type scheme, but perhaps a growing grant for college based on your grades throughout your school career.

Could be done using game dynamics and you earn points based on your work then at the end of high school you can convert those points into paid credit hours.

DevX101• 16 years ago

Most young children don't fully understand WHY they need a good education. Many students that do well in school in the early years, did so because their parents forced them to study.

If a child doesn't have that parental pressure and support to excel, maybe money can be a decent albeit imperfect substitute.

KleinmanB• 16 years ago

After basic education (up until highschool) why not let kids pick what they want to learn. Forcing people to do anything after puberty is fruitless. You dont see high school football coaches having to force the kids to stay on the team. Why is education any different?

waterhouse• 16 years ago

Link is to the fourth page of the article, rather than the first. I'd gently suggest fixing that, or avoiding it in the future.

TamDenholm• 16 years ago

I think rather than trying to bribe children to go to school because they hate it they should instead concentrate on making school actually interesting.

Personally i feel that most school systems are factories that teach kids to be test takers, not question authority, not think for themselves and do it the way they're told because thats the way its always been done.

How about we provide some intrinsic motivation instead, make school interesting. Basic reading, writing and arithmetic should be compulsory but let kids choose whatever they want to learn after that.

I also dont think we really need teachers in specific subjects, generalist teachers that work with kids to support them could help a child create his own curriculum, the internet makes this a very real possibility these days.

sievert• 16 years ago

I thought that's how it works everywhere? I'm from NZ, you must take English and Maths up until a certain age, otherwise just pick your other four subjects and enjoy.

Jach2• 16 years ago

What's the variety for your other four subjects? If you can take a year of nothing but physics (or computer science) in high school/junior high, then NZ rocks, but I'd guess they're just giving you an illusion of choice while still forcing you through the general education classes since that's all there is. Not to mention prerequisite hell plagues all hierarchical forms of education and if you don't have understanding administrators it's really hard to move ahead when "you're not supposed to."

hoop4• 16 years ago

> Personally i feel that most school systems are factories that teach kids to be test takers, not question authority, not think for themselves and do it the way they're told because thats the way its always been done.

All of those are true. The American public education system is actually based on the Prussian education system. John Taylor Gatto writes about this in "Against School" and argues that this education system is actually designed to make the public mass more "manageable." It also helps to turn us into major consumers.

shawndrost2• 16 years ago

Why "rather than"? Do this if it works. If there are other methods that also pan out well, do them too.

InclinedPlane• 16 years ago

Kids begin with a boundless inquisitiveness and enthusiasm for learning, yet the drudgery of the school system burns that out of most kids quite rapidly.

ewjordan• 16 years ago

First off, I think it's worth noting that the current system of motivation, based on grades, is hardly better than straight up bribery, it's just that the theoretical rewards of the "bribe" (good college, great career, etc.) are so far in the future that they're pretty much invisible to most of the people in the system, except for the truly pathetic worry-wart-weiner-dogs that actually change their actions based on potential ten-year-hence consequences as high school students (which, I realize, is a category that many of us fall into, and there's probably something wrong with that, but now's not the time or the place...I was one of them, so I'm not going to cast stones).

I think rather than trying to bribe children to go to school because they hate it they should instead concentrate on making school actually interesting.

And I think rather than trying to bribe adults into doing work because they hate it it would be fantastic if we could try to make it interesting instead, so they would want to do it without compensation.

Of course, failing that, we have to pay them, because it's more useful to have a person do a dollar's worth of work for a "cheap" reason such as money than it is to keep the dollar in our pocket. Doesn't matter how nice it would be if the person really desired to do that work of their own accord, it's worth more to us to pay them than it is not to, so we do it.

Where's that analysis here?

From my interactions tutoring the hideously under-interested youth of America, at least the rich parents that care about such things would almost certainly be far better off (dollars and cents-wise) paying their kids a nominal wage to do their f-ing homework than they are paying me $80/hr to sit with them and force them to do it - even if I am there to answer the occasional question and review the material in a (hopefully?) more comprehensible way than the teachers might at school, in my experience the real gains are simply achieved by forcing kids to think about the topic for a certain amount of extra time every week, which they typically would never do on their own.

Basic reading, writing and arithmetic should be compulsory but let kids choose whatever they want to learn after that.

I'm all in favor of that idea. But you may underestimate the extent to which we're not even covering reading, writing, and arithmetic the way things stand. As educated people we tend to assume that everyone else is at least in the same ballpark as us, but look...those comments that you see all the time on YouTube, and chuckle at, assuming they're written by non-native English speakers? They are, in fact, pretty close to the average quality of the prose you'll get if you ask an average classroom of American students to write an essay.

ChRoss• 16 years ago

For research sake, I think it's worth to try. As for whether it's going to be implemented, it needs to be analyzed and planned properly. Don't make children think it's so easy to earn money.

I think the problem with nowadays education is they are very bounded with curriculum. Schools shouldn't be a place just to learn, but also to have fun, socialize, make friends.

hoop4• 16 years ago

This idea goes in the opposite direction of what Daniel Pink talks about in his book "Drive" ( or TED talk here: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html )

What Daniel Pink says is that extrinsic motivators (such as money,) have actually been found to be _harmful_ to performance when used to reward cognitive or intellectual activities. I would imagine "getting an education" to fall under this category, but maybe not so much.

Conversely, extrinsic motivators are still known to work fine for repetitive, "mechanical" tasks (think: assembly line).

qq66• 16 years ago

I'm not sure that these kinds of experiments on adults can be applied to kids. We need to run a separate set of experiments on kids, the motivations are too different.

dhess• 16 years ago

I was just reading about extrinsic motivators today in the book, What the Best College Teachers Do. The research cited there dates back to the 1970s and the work of Edward L. Deci. Apparently what he and his colleagues found is that most extrinsic motivators (money, prizes, grades) actually do work as long as they continue to be applied, but their effect on motivation or engagement is lost once the extrinsic motivator is removed; and, in fact, application of an extrinsic motivator appears to weaken any intrinsic motivation that existed before the extrinsic motivator was applied.

This theory has ramifications not only for paying students to go to school, or for good performance, but also whether grades are ultimately harmful to long-term student learning and comprehension. The research suggests that students who perceive getting good grades as a reward for studying tend to view learning as a performance or competition, not as a quest for mastery or self-fulfillment. When they graduate into the real world and are no longer rewarded with grades, they tend to stop learning, because the extrinsic motivator (grades) is removed. They also tend to "study for the test" and forget the lessons soon after, as the goal is always to perform well on the next exam, not to retain knowledge.

Not all extrinsic motivators appear to be damaging to intrinsic motivation. For example, the researchers (and those who have continued Deci's work) found that encouragement and praise were extrinsic motivators that often reinforce, or at least sustain, intrinsic motivation. The theory is that people (especially children) lose intrinsic motivation if they think they're being manipulated by the external reward: verbal encouragement and social acceptance are supposedly less transparent means of motivation than, say, money or grades.

Before reading this part of the book, I had thought that perhaps paying students for good academic performance was a good idea. Now I wonder if perhaps paying parents for their child's good performance is the right way to go, accompanied by a short course on developmental psychology for the parents.

shawndrost2• 16 years ago

And yet, the results in this article show extrinsic motivators to be beneficial to performance on some cognitive activities. Seems like it's an area that merits more research.

On a slightly more meta level, it seems like TED and Gladwell are making more topics bikesheddable.

hoop4• 16 years ago

Re: Meta - Perhaps, although the talk on Daniel Pink was something that was first shown to me in a class. After seeing it, I decided to read his book on my own time.

Also, for anyone who is interested in the book, I recommend just watching the video as it sums EVERYTHING up. The book just provides slightly more evidence and explanation.

jessriedel3• 16 years ago

Does he study children? The parenting schedule I have heard before is

(1) Young children are compelled to act by rewards/punishments. (2) Older children are compelled to act because they respect their parents' directions, even if they don't understand or agree with the directions. (3) Young adults choose to follows their parents because they understand and agree with the directions.

The point is that young children are just not cognitively able to appreciate adult reasoning. Yes, it's great if we can get 2nd graders excited about multiplication tables, but that's usually not possible.

sliverstorm2• 16 years ago

If you provide a source of external motivation, they will never find the motivation within themselves to learn, and thus will be screwed as soon as you remove that external motivation.

In other words, as soon as you stop paying them to learn, they will stop learning. You set them up for failure by removing the chance to learn to be self-motivated.

chii• 16 years ago

See, what if they can never be intrinsically motivated? no body wants to do "work" - by providing extrinsic motivation, you at least achieve the result (of making them learn something). Who knows, why might even become good at what they learnt, and turns that into a career.

hoop4• 16 years ago

If someone can't ever be intrinsically motivated, then they are likely suffering from psychological inertia (apathy) and there are other, more pertinent issues to address. IANAPsychologist

jessriedel3• 16 years ago

This is exactly the kind of conventional wisdom that needs to be actually tested, rather than assumed.

arn• 16 years ago

exactly, reading through the article, the researcher got a lot of negative feedback (death threats) throughout the course. He wasn't ever saying we necessarily should be providing financial incentives, but he was asking if they work or not before automatically deciding against them.

it reminds me of an article I read about some organization doing scientific studies on charity. I wish I had the link handy.

There was once instance where people would charge people in 3rd world countries a nominal fee for HIV medications, thinking that the compliance in taking the medications would increase if you assigned some non-zero value to it. they did a formal study and found that it was less effective overall than just giving away the medicine.

sliverstorm2• 16 years ago

Yes, you're probably right. I'm just always stumped by the part where you can't try a dry-run in educational theory- you actually have to try it out, and you run the risk of screwing up a kid's education.

aaronblohowiak• 16 years ago

No, kids should have jobs. If kids have jobs that suck, then they will want to work harder at school so they won't have a sucky job when they graduate.

sp4rki• 16 years ago

The hell no. As DevX101 said, children don't understand why they need to get an education in the first place. This creates the impression that going to school is a job when it most certainly is not. There is a difference between offering an occasional prize (a toy, lunch, or event) because a kid did well, and making them believe they are entitled to get paid because of their performance in school. There's also the fact that I believe it can hinder the natural curiosity a kid may have by introducing a mitigating factor in the process of choosing his/her interests. Lastly there's the fact that some kids are - sadly - complete imbeciles. Are this kid's not going to get payed because they did badly, even though they might have even tried a whole lot harder than the other kids?

I say, let the smart kids be smart, let the dumb kids be dumb, let the in between's be regular children. Hell imagine every kid becomes a "smart" kid because of payment; can you imagine the surplus of people in comparison to employment opportunities in the "brainy" work sectors?

buddydvd• 16 years ago

Back in elementary school, my math teacher gave out virtual money (in the form of xeroxed monopoly money stamped with a special seal) to students who completed homework assignments and those that did well on tests. One day out of every week, he would bring a bunch of goodies (e.g. mechanical pencils) to class and auction them off to the highest bidders with these monopoly money. The auctions were very enjoyable since it was interesting to see people outbidding each others in the process. Being much of a saver myself, I accumulated a huge sum of these monopoly money and kept all of them in one of my 3-ring binders. One day, I discovered someone stole all of them while I left my backpack unattended. After telling my teacher about it, he told everyone to open their backpacks and inspected them. However, we never found out who stole them and it sucked because after that incident, I started to distrust some of my friends. I think this system could be improved if the rewards were non-tranferrable. Perhaps someone can build a web application that lets teachers employ such technique and allows students to accumulate money in the digital form?

Jach2• 16 years ago

tldr: More experiments, please!

I'm all for more experiments in this area, since we need them to combat our bad intuitions and simple conjectures, and as others have noted we especially need to find out what happens to these kids when you take away the rewards. Considering that atheists don't fall into extreme immorality after rejecting their religion, I'm willing to bet that most of the kids wouldn't just fall back into old patterns or become worse off than before, even though this doesn't make me intuitively comfortable... Again, we need experiments.

There's also some slight bitterness I feel that others around here might share. We're smart and we made it through the system without these nice monetary rewards. $95 a week? For not dressing like crap and not talking back and doing some trivial homework? $95 is a lot of money, I never got that, and when I worked 20 hour weeks at a grocery store one year my weekly paychecks were roughly $120. People should just be motivated to learn on their own without these rewards, and the whole grading system in general helps to undermine this...

As TamDenholm noted, the fact that we need to use such motivations for something as important as learning is more a symptom than solution of an underlying problem with the education system. The point in the article about how they desire to foster intrinsic motivation with extrinsic rewards made me do a double take. Yet the solution still isn't "let the students do what they want", because most will do the minimum, and then schools will cut budgets and staff, and with only "generalist" teachers you get generally shallow teachers across all subjects. I'll agree that some teachers can teach more subjects than one and many classes can benefit from a mixture that only a special generalist could adequately teach (it always bugs me when math teachers admit their ignorance on the uses of complex numbers), but we really need specialists. The college model is correct here.

hga• 16 years ago

Here's one nasty detail that should be taken into account: some fraction of parents will just confiscate the payments from their children.

Should Kids Be Paid to Do Well in School?

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