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Rewards for Students Under a Microscope

Ohanian Comment:
Mayor-controlled school districts ignore
Professor of Psychology and Social Science
Edward Deci's long-respected research on
rewards and punishments. They jump on economic
professor Roland Fryer's theories. Guess which
one has done tons of classroom research? Guess
who has received tons of money from the Broad
Foundation? Eli Broad is behind economist
Roland Fryer's setup, which, surprise surprise,
has gotten a strong foothold in districts with
mayoral control of schools.

Train kids that they will be paid when they
behave and they will grow up to be complaint
workers in the Global Economy, not asking for
democracy,justice, and other such things. They
certainly will not demand such things. And even
though they know the stuff their money will buy
is crap, they will be well trained to be the
consumer capitalism demands.

Read far enough in the article and you will
finally get to mention of Deci's research on
the kind of reward systems Broad is financing.
Here are some specific references.



Deci, E. L. (1971). Effects of externally
mediated rewards on intrinsic motivation.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
18, 105-115.

Deci, E. L. (1972a). Effects of contingent and
non-contingent rewards and controls on
intrinsic motivation. Organizational Behavior
and Human Performance, 8, 217-229.

Deci, E. L. (1972b). Intrinsic motivation,
extrinsic reinforcement, and inequity. Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology, 22, 113-
120.




Deci's groundbreaking work showed that
extrinsic rewards such as monetary payments
undermine people's intrinsic motivation for the
rewarded activity. Since his early
investigations, more than 100 studies have been
done which support his findings. Read Alfie
Kohn for convincing updates. Kohn's classic
Punished by Rewards challenges the
widely held assumption that incentives lead to
improved quality and increased output in the
workplace and in schools. It is even more
important today than when he wrote it.


By Lisa Guernsey

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.

But many economists and businesspeople
disagree, and their views often prevail in the
educational marketplace. Reward programs that
pay students are under way in many cities. In
some places, students can bring home hundreds
of dollars for, say, taking an Advanced
Placement course and scoring well on the exam.

Whether such efforts work or backfire
“continues to be a raging debate,” said Barbara
A. Marinak, an assistant professor of education
at Penn State, who opposes using prizes as
incentives. Among parents, the issue often
stirs intense discussion. And in public
education, a new focus on school reform has led
researchers on both sides of the debate to
intensify efforts to gather data that may
provide insights on when and if rewards work.

“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.”

What is clear is that reward programs are
proliferating, especially in high-poverty
areas. In New York City and Dallas, high school
students are paid for doing well on Advanced
Placement tests. In New York, the payouts come
from an education reform group called Rewarding
Achievement (Reach for short), financed by the
Pershing Square Foundation, a charity founded
by the hedge fund manager Bill Ackman. The
Dallas program is run by Advanced Placement
Strategies, a Texas nonprofit group whose
chairman is the philanthropist Peter O’Donnell.

Another experiment was started last fall in 14
public schools in Washington that are
distributing checks for good grades, attendance
and behavior. That program, Capital Gains, is
being financed by a partnership with SunTrust
Bank, Borders and Ed Labs at Harvard, which is
run by Dr. Fryer. Another program by Ed Labs is
getting started in Chicago.

Other systems are about stuff more than money,
and most are not evaluated scientifically. At
80 tutoring centers in eight states run by
Score! Educational Centers, a national for-
profit company run by Kaplan Inc., students are
encouraged to rack up points for good work and
redeem them for prizes like jump-ropes.

An increasing number of online educational
games entice children to keep playing by giving
them online currency to buy, say, virtual pets.
And around the country, elementary school
children get tokens to redeem at gift shops in
schools when they behave well.

In the cash programs being studied, economists
compare the academic performance of groups of
students who are paid and students who are not.
Results from the first year of the A.P. program
in New York showed that test scores were flat
but that more students were taking the tests,
said Edward Rodriguez, the program’s executive
director.

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.

Still, many psychologists warn that early data
can be deceiving. 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.”

Dr. Marinak, of Penn State, and Linda B.
Gambrell, a professor of education at Clemson
University, published a study last year in the
journal Literacy Research and Instruction
showing that rewarding third graders with so-
called tokens, like toys and candy, diminished
the time they spent reading.

“A number of the kids who received tokens
didn’t even return to reading at all,” Dr.
Marinak said.

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’?”

More than 100 academic studies have explored
how and when rewards work on people of all
ages, and researchers have offered competing
analyses of what the studies, taken together,
really mean.

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.

Many cash-based programs being tested today,
however, are designed to do just that. Dr. Deci
asks educators to consider the effect of
monetary rewards on students with learning
disabilities. When they go home with a smaller
payout while seeing other students receive
checks for $500, Dr. Deci said, they may feel
unfairly punished and even less excited to go
to school.

“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.”

Economists, on the other hand, argue that with
students who are failing, everything should be
tried, including rewards. While students may be
simply attracted by financial incentives at
first, couldn’t that evolve into a love of
learning?

“They may work a little harder and may find
that they aren’t so bad at it,” said Dr.
Jackson, of Cornell. “And they may learn study
methods that last over time.”

In examining rewards, the trick is untangling
the impact of the monetary prizes from the
impact of other factors, like the strength of
teaching or the growing recognition among
educators of the importance of A.P. tests. Dr.
Jackson said his latest analyses, not yet
published, would seek to answer the questions.

He also pointed out that with children in
elementary school, who typically show more
motivation to learn than teenagers do, the
outcomes may be different.

Questions about how rewards are administered,
to whom and at what age are likely to drive
future research. Can incentives — praise,
grades, pizza parties, cash — be added up to
show that the more, the better? Or will some of
them detract from the whole?

Dr. Deci says school systems are trying to lump
incentives together as if they had a simple
additive effect. He emphasizes that there is a
difference between being motivated by something
tangible and being motivated by something that
is felt or sensed. “We’ve taken motivation and
put it in categories,” Dr. Deci said of his
fellow psychologists. “Economics is 40 years
behind with respect to that.”

Some researchers suggest tweaking reward
systems to cause less harm. Dr. Lepper says
that the more arbitrary the reward — like
giving bubble gum for passing a test — the more
likely it is to backfire. Dr. Gambrell, of
Clemson, posits a “proximity hypothesis,”
holding that rewards related to the activity —
like getting to read more books if one book is
read successfully — are less harmful. And Dr.
Deci and Richard M. Ryan report that praise —
which some consider a verbal reward — does not
have a negative effect.

In fact, praise itself has categories. Carol
Dweck, a Stanford psychologist, has found
problems with praise that labels a child as
having a particular quality (“You’re so
smart”), while praise for actions (“You’re
working hard”) is more motivating.

Psychologists have also found that it helps to
isolate differences in how children perceive
tasks. Are they highly interested in what they
are doing? Or does it feel like drudgery? “The
same reward system might have a different
effect on those two types of students,” Dr.
Lepper said. The higher the interest, he said,
the more harmful the reward.

Meanwhile, Dr. Fryer of Ed Labs urges patience
in awaiting the economists’ take on reward
systems. He wants to look at what happens over
many years by tracking subjects after
incentives end and trying to discern whether
the incentives have an impact on high school
graduation rates.

With the money being used to pay for the
incentive programs and research, “every dollar
has value,” he said. “We either get social
science or social change, and we need both.”



— Lisa Guernsey
New York Times
2009-03-03


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