With the growing trend in school districts around the country to reward students and teachers based largely on test scores, it was with great excitement that I saw the following headline on the front-page of today’s New York Times’ Science section: “Rewards for Students Under a Microscope.” This is especially good to see considering that the NY Times Editorial Page has consistently supported such rewards as good educational practice.
The article, by reporter Lisa Guernsey, opens with a great summary of the critique of rewards for students:
For decades, psychologists have warned against giving children prizes or money for their performance in school. “Extrinsic” rewards, they say — a stuffed animal for a 4-year-old who learns her alphabet, cash for a good report card in middle or high school — can undermine the joy of learning for its own sake and can even lead to cheating.
Guernsey then goes on to mention and quote some of the leading educators and psychologists who have long been publicizing the negative effects of rewards on students’ intrinsic motivation and enjoyment for learning, including education writer Alfie Kohn and University of Rochester psychology researchers Ed Deci and Richard Ryan. Here’s an excerpt from the Times article:
Research suggests that rewards may work in the short term but have damaging effects in the long term.
One of the first such studies was published in 1971 by Edward L. Deci, a psychologist at the University of Rochester, who reported that once the incentives stopped coming, students showed less interest in the task at hand than those who received no reward.
This kind of psychological research was popularized by the writer Alfie Kohn, whose 1993 book “Punished by Rewards: The Trouble With Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise and Other Bribes” is still often cited by educators and parents. Mr. Kohn says he sees “social amnesia” in the renewed interest in incentive programs.
“If we’re using gimmicks like rewards to try to improve achievement without regard to how they affect kids’ desire to learn,” he said, “we kill the goose that laid the golden egg.”
I particularly was interested in this study by Stanford psychologist Mark Lepper:
Why does motivation seem to fall away? Some researchers theorize that even at an early age, children can sense that someone is trying to control their behavior. Their reaction is to resist. “One of the central questions is to consider how children think about this,” said Mark R. Lepper, a psychologist at Stanford whose 1973 study of 50 preschool-age children came to a conclusion similar to Dr. Deci’s. “Are they saying, ‘Oh, I see, they are just bribing me’?”
If there is one thing that my work with young people in both conventional and freedom-based environments has shown me, it is that young people can very easily tell when adults have an ulterior motive for what they say or suggest to students. And over time, this leads to young people becoming more and more wary of teachers and adults to the point that they find it hard to trust adults and even avoid their gaze, for fear that adults will tell them to do something else or make a critical judgment.
Yet as Guernsey states, it is clear whose influence now reigns in education circles:
. . . many economists and businesspeople disagree [with the critiques of performance rewards], and their views often prevail in the educational marketplace.
The article presents this perspective, including quoting Roland Fryer, Harvard economist who served from 2007-2008 as Chief Equality Officer with the NYC Department of Education, during which time he promoted and designed student and teacher incentive programs. (By the way, not to dismiss the contributions of economists, but should an economist be the sole person leading school improvement efforts? At the least an experienced K-12 educator ought to be part of the leadership, no?). Fryer makes the following point,
“We have to get beyond our biases,” said Roland Fryer, an economist at Harvard University who is designing and testing several reward programs. “Fortunately, the scientific method allows us to get to most of those biases and let the data do the talking.”
But what data? And what other data might we be ignoring?
This is the essential point for me: that the issue here is not whether rewards increase test scores. As Kohn, Deci, Ryan, and Lepper all point out, any short term gains (and one could question whether an increase in a dubiously-worthy multiple-choice test is actually a “gain” in anything meaningful) pale in comparison to the very real and long-term damage inflicted on many young people who are subjected to rewards systems: namely, that rewards systems very often are associated with diminished student interest and motivation for the activity or topic that was paired with a reward. And there is a great deal of data to back this up (just Google “Ed Deci” or “Alfie Kohn” to find a ton).
So, sure, some students may increase their test scores when offered a reward for doing so, and certainly more students will take tests that have rewards tied to them, especially students from lower-income families, something Deci points out in his insightful comment, “‘There are suggestions of students making in the thousands of dollars,’ he said. ‘The stress of that, for kids from homes with no money, I frankly think it’s unconscionable.’”
But at what long-term cost to young people? Less interest and intrinsic motivation in the activity, increased stress and competition, even lower quality work, as Lepper’s study indicates.
This, then, is what happens when there is a dominant economic and business influence in education: increased student output through whatever means are necessary, without much regard to the fact that young people are human beings with personalities, emotions, and rights that ought not be dismissed or abused in the name of increased performance.
Yet now with the massive economic crisis stemming from the deplorable business practices of late, we should be ever-more critical and wary of economic- and business-driven reforms throughout society, most especially in the social sectors such as education. I’ll end with a provocative comment from “a.r., Los Angeles” on the NY Times website from a reader of the article:
Isn’t the recent financial debacle proof enough that a) money as a motivator can lead to very bad things and b) economics does not provide a perfect model for human behavior? And why are poor kids our de facto guinea pigs in this social science experiment?
Indeed, why?
