Strings Attached by Ruth W. Grant

Author:Ruth W. Grant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2011-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

Motivating Children to Learn

In Dallas, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and other urban areas, “pay for grades” programs have quickly become popular.* The programs vary in the age of students involved (from third grade to high school), in the behaviors rewarded (attendance, high test scores, high grades, basic classroom decorum), and in the payoffs (one program allows students to earn up to $1,500). The hope is that these programs, generally targeting poor, minority students, will help solve the seemingly intractable problem of the minority “achievement gap.” While it is very common to use incentives of various kinds to motivate children to do all kinds of things, paying cold, hard cash for good grades is particularly controversial.

In evaluating the ethics of “pay for grades” policies, the first obvious question is, “Do these programs work as compared to alternative approaches?” And, of course, some of the controversy swirls around the question of what it means for a program to “work”—are higher grades or better annual test scores sufficient to declare victory, or are we aiming for students who will continue to be motivated to learn in the future? So, the first question leads directly to the second: “How do these programs affect character?”

Of all of the incentive programs examined in this book, incentives used to motivate children to learn are most centrally involved with the character question. Schools, after all, are concerned not only with the cognitive development of children but also with their personal and social development; these are central to their purpose.95 And the concern with character involves encouraging children not only to do the right things but also to do them for the right reasons.

The striking thing is that today’s incentive programs are touted as radically innovative approaches where “the jury is out” on whether or not incentives work to motivate academic achievement.96 In fact, there is nothing new about these sorts of programs—and the debate over their effectiveness is a very old one. Moreover, with fifty-plus years of research in psychology and contemporary work in economics, there seems to be a clear consensus about two conclusions. First, under certain circumstances, incentives “backfire,” producing the opposite of their intended effects.97 Second, monetary incentives “crowd out” less mercenary motives, producing a negative effect on character as well as on outcomes. Thus, incentives work sometimes to accomplish certain kinds of goals, and they fail at other times. The important thing, as we will see shortly, is that the research is clear about which conditions produce which results.

Disputes over motivation stand behind the controversies over incentives in education. How are incentives—a form of extrinsic motivation—related to intrinsic forms of motivation, such as the satisfaction of curiosity or the sense of competence or mastery? This question has been around for a very long time. Before it arose around paying cash for grades, it was disputed about the grades themselves. It is worth noting that paying for grades is offering an incentive for an incentive. Grades are an incentive to learn—an extrinsic reward for academic achievement—and

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