http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95949912
I found this NPR article on motivating school children to be rather interesting and perhaps somewhat controversial. It talks about paying children according to their attendance, quality of work, and behavior in class. My initial reaction to this story is that this type of program is a great experiment. We already spend tremendous amounts of money on education, but continue to get very poor results in many schools. I think money has sometimes been mindlessly thrown here and there, and we don't see any good come from that. It has sometimes been said that raising the teacher pay will bring in higher quality people or that bringing in various new classroom materials will help students learn, but the problem seems to be deeper than that.
As was mentioned earlier on our blog, one major problem is "stupid homework." By no means am I referring to all, or even most, homework, but in my educational experience I have had plenty of assignments that have just been downright meaningless. You waste a great amount of time, learn nothing, and feel like you've lost a few brain cells in the process. Another part of the problem is that the belief that homework/studying is unpleasant and to be avoided has been instilled in many of us from a very early age. There seems to be a negative connotation with learning, and I think we should work harder to change that, perhaps by doing more to support "science is fun" programs and others like it. If students perceive educational activities as fun, they will find greater energy to put into their learning.
I also think schools can put too much emphasis on grades, which can subsequently cause some children to focus only on letter grades and many others to become apathetic about the education system. Although I have generally got rather good grades throughout my academic career, and a certain amount of assessment is surely needed, putting so much of the emphasis on a few short (and sometimes poorly written) tests does not seem to be the best approach. Sometimes such tests tell you very little about the students except perhaps their abilities to discern/anticipate what information will be asked on the test and cram accordingly. I think many students feel this way, and they feel discouraged when think that they will not be fairly evaluated.
This may be more a problem in the high school and college environments, but I think another very serious problem with our education is an overwhelming lack of clarity in certain classroom environments. Sometimes students are required to read very old texts that are written in an English language that is very different from our own. It is unreasonable for students to be required to read these texts without any guidance from the instructor - the professor should be there for a reason. In college, I know of at least one professor who gets away with murder by having "discussion-based" classes in which the student is given no other instruction than to "read the textbook" - such professors contribute nothing yet get paid in full. When teachers do not present material in a clear, thought out, and interesting manner, the student can become very discouraged and the learning process is heavily impeded. It is a far from ideal outcome to cause some students to have anxiety attacks and others to give up entirely. More needs to be done to address this problem.
The controversy that arises from this Pay-To-Behave experiment also merits attention. A question that inevitably arises is, "Even if these financial incentives greatly increase academic performance, is teaching children to learn solely for money to be desired?" Some would probably argue that it is no different than receiving an allowance for doing chores or a paycheck for a job, but I am still not entirely sure how I would feel if I were one of the parents. I am not sure I would be comfortable sending a child through this program if I thought it would cause them to place money above everything else.
I think that paying students, especially younger children, money to go to school will backfire. I believe that at a young age many students want to do well in school, because it is internally rewarding. When I was in elementary school I always felt good about myself if I received a gold star or in high school when I got an A on a paper I worked hard on. By paying students, they will start to only do their homework or go to school for an external reward, and take away their internal motivation. I think that there are other ways to motivate students from a young age to want to be successful in school.
In reading about this, I remember a year ago in the News back home in Texas that some schools were trying it out, this pay to go to school thing. So when I was looking for the interview or news segment I came across this little posting on CNN. It's local to Iowa, Des Moines actually, and along the same lines, but is paying I think the parent to be involved with their student and the school.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/09/15/paying.grades/index.html
To me paying a student who already gets good grades would not have much benefit, but maybe paying a student who hates to go to school or you know is capable of doing the work, might motivate them enough. Yet, personally, it's a hopeful stretch. I think it can cause a whole lot of trouble, cause when learning equals money, then where is the importance of learning.
This is a very interesting topic, it is no surprise it is controversial considering the nature of paying inner-city children to go to school and/or perform well. In the article it is cited that $15,000-$17,000 is spent per student trying to improve their performance and motivation through current practices. This staggering amount of money is often grossly mismanaged, I definitely agree with the poster of this blog. There are many factors at work here, school based intelligence, racism and intrinsic and extrinsic motivators and parenting.
Issues become convoluted when race is involved. It is common psychological knowledge that genetics account for around 50-75 percent of tendencies of behavior with environment filling the remaining gap. Since the inner-city schools are the ones having the problems, the idea for students to earn money while extrinsically motivating is still a very strong motivator considering the income level of inner-city families. My first thought would initially go to why aren’t they trying to implement things that increased intrinsic motivation? The comments in the article that say the idea of pay-to-behave is racist, and it is buying off the problem parents and students may have some truth to them. Not one individual had turned down the program stating the money was very motivating to both the parent and student. As far as the racism, the program most likely is primarily targeting a specific group; it is simple statistics that there are more African-Americans in poverty than whites. These parents are also not going to get involved in their child’s school life.
So while it may seem to be a payoff targeting African-American inner-city students, I don’t really see a problem. If a student is enriched and educated, not only will his self-efficacy increase, but grades, and that heightened sense of self-efficacy could really help these students escape the environment they had no choice in being brought up in. It is very similar to getting a paycheck for a job. The money could become a generalized stimulus to learning, alienating students from wanting to learn anything without being compensated for it, though I still stand by the fact that a program could be developed more successfully to incorporate intrinsic motivators. It is also proven that black children learn with different methods of teaching. With more autonomic classrooms and intrinsic motivation in place, in theory, it would perpetuate much better results than those driven by extrinsic motivators. In some situations the strength of the money as an extrinsic motivator may actually be strong enough to override anything else. I would be very interested in seeing the results of this study.
I think this seems like a good idea, but what happens when when/if the kids get to college or a job that is not going to pay them just to show up or not be disruptive. The children who are intrinsically motivated are going to keep getting the good grades and showing up for class. But giving money as an extrinsic motivator is not going to make the kids want to learn or come to class, they will only be doing it for the money. There needs to be more research done on this, but i think that children could be motivated in other ways.