The New York Times featured an interesting article yesterday about whether children and adolescents should be given cash and prizes as rewards for scholastic performance. The pro-reward camp takes an education-and-economics perspective, arguing that children and adolescents, like all people, respond to tangible incentives; thus, schools can encourage academic performance by tying achievement to rewards that students value. The anti-reward camp consists mostly of psychologists and educators who argue that extrinsic rewards hamper long-term achievement by contaminating students' innate "desire to learn" with external incentives. Once those rewards stop coming, the anti-reward camp argues, kids stop trying.
As the Times notes, there is anecdotal support for both these views. The percentage of New York City high school students taking Advanced Placement tests rose this year after the district offered students a cash payment for high AP scores. A cash incentive system for Dallas high schools students also coincided with increased student achievement:
| In Dallas, where teachers are also paid for students’ high A.P. scores, students who are rewarded score higher on the SAT and enroll in college at a higher rate than those who are not, according to Kirabo Jackson, an assistant professor of economics at Cornell who has written about the program for the journal Education Next. |
But the anti-reward camp argues that such gains are merely illusory, and that reward systems ultimately decrease students' motivation to learn in the long term:
| Judith Cameron, an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Alberta, found positive traits in some types of reward systems. But in keeping with the work of other psychologists, her studies show that some students, once reward systems are over, will choose not to do the activity if the system provides subpar performers with a smaller prize than the reward for achievers. |
For the anti-reward camp, those who give children tangible incentives for academic performance ultimately run the risk of "undermin[ing] the joy of learning for its own sake.
Why the anti-reward camp has it wrong, after the jump.
Although I certainly have some sympathy for the anti-reward camp's celebration of learning for learning's sake, I find their vision divorced from the reality of education in modern society. Let's face it--schools in America are not, nor have they ever been, places where children and adolescents gather 'round Great Teachers such as Socrates to quench an insatiable thirst for knowledge. Western education is already monetarily incentivized, it's just incentivized over an extremely long time horizon. Work hard in school, we tell our children, and you too can live the American Dream. You can go to college--maybe even Harvard!--and get a high-paying job. Implicit in much of what we tell our students is that they will ultimately be rewarded for their scholastic performance with a career that affords them a middle-to-upper-class lifestyle.
The problem is that this incentivization of education simply does not resonate with many students. As a high school student, I remember asking my geometry teacher why on Earth I would ever need to know how to solve for a hypotenuse, as I was not planning on being a fence-builder when I grew up.. "Well," my teacher said, "You may not ever use this in your day-to-day life, but you'll definitely need it to attain a good score on the SAT, go to college, and get a good job." That probably made perfect sense to my teacher. At the age of 14, though, I was convinced I was headed to the NBA, so my teacher's attempted long-term incentivization of geometry failed to resonate with me.
But put aside the reality that many children and adolescents are absolutely convinced that they will grow up to be athletes, actresses, or rappers. There is still the fact that the long-term rational calculations that our current incentivization system asks students to make is, in some sense, impossible for young minds to process. Studies have shown that children and adolescent brains are not yet pysically developed enough to "make decisions based on short-term gains versus long-term consequences." So, even though a rational adult might decide see the utility in studying for that English test, getting a high GPA, going to college, going to law school, and landing a job at a high-paying law firm, such long-term incentivization simply does not compute in developing brains. Hence, a 14-year-old may well ignore the English test and play video games because, hell, there are Halo aliens to kill and that English test sure isn't going to kill them.
On the other hand, if that 14-year-old has a $100 check waiting for him if he makes an "A" in English, Halo may well be put aside for Jane Eyre. Short-term incentives like cash, stickers, or stuffed animals are the kinds of incentives that children and adolescents are hard-wired to appreciate. And while kids are undoubtedly going to learn more if they are excited about a subject, many kids need a reason to even start focusing on a certain subject at all. Sure, there are kids out there who are innately curious about science and are going to pay attention in science class no matter what. But there are also kids that may have a gift for science that, for whatever reason, a priori hostile to the subject. These are the students that might be motivated by short-term incentives to develop a passion for a subject.
Simply put, given the state of education in America, it's not enough to simply sit back and hope that every individual student will naturally develop an interest in each and every scholastic subject. We need to broaden students' educational horizons and actively encourage them to take that AP class, to study for the SAT, to stay in school. Extrinsic rewards are no panacea for a rich curriculum or great teaching, but they can be used effectively as a catalyst that sparks student interest. One of the most interesting pledged gifts we have in our pilot program, for example, is from a Palestinian-American who wants to expand students' knowledge of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Our donor is sponsoring an essay contest for a class of students with a $250 cash prize for the student whose essay best proposes a peaceful solution to the conflict. I anticipate that there will be a number of students who will be motivated by a $250 prize and will pour their hearts into researching the Middle East conflict. Are they motivated by what the anti-reward camp might consider the wrong reasons? Perhaps. But rest assured, the next time those students pick up a newspaper and read the latest news from Gaza or Jerusalem, they will have a deeper understanding and appreciation of that news story, and, most likely, a deeper and more abiding interest in the topic as well.
Throwing resources around is never an absolute cure for anything. But smart allocation of resources--including, perhaps, money or other extrinsic rewards geared towards students directly--can make a huge differenc in education.