Why aren’t
rewards working?
“Everybody has won, and all
must have prizes.”
Lewis Carroll’s Dodo, Alice in Wonderland
Reward systems hold the promise of digital tracking of
students’ effort and decisions in lessons.
But sometimes they backfire, as this teacher points out:
“When the new system was
introduced, one of my pupils shouted:
‘You get points just for
showing up! What does that teach us?’ Looking later at the stats,
I noticed that the top five
reward earners were the worst behaved students in the entire school. Prizes
were simply being used as a way of getting kids to do what they should be doing
anyway, rather than to reward students for going the extra mile. The attitude
was ‘oh well,
I’ll get more later anyway, I
can’t be bothered to answer these questions, so I won’t’. That’s when
it struck me: giving out
unmerited rewards all the time actually legitimised their poor behaviour.”
Economics
A couple of stories from economic research can enlighten
us as to why incentives backfire:
‘When people were given a small
stipend for donating blood rather than
simply praised for their
altruism, they actually donated less blood. The stipend turned a noble act
of charity into a painful way
to make money, and it simply wasn’t worth it.’
‘Nursery schools started fining
parents who turned up late to pick up their children at 4pm.
The result was striking: the
number of late pick-ups more than doubled.’
There are two main types of incentives: economic, and
social or moral. The fine and the stipend backfired because they substituted an
economic incentive for a moral incentive.
Stephen Covey calls the carrot and the stick
approach ‘animal psychology’,
‘the great jackass technique of human motivation’.
Daniel Pink also exposes the flaws of carrots and sticks:
‘Rewards often don’t help and often harm:
they
end up giving us less of what we want: they extinguish intrinsic motivation,
diminish performance, crush
creativity and crowd out good behaviour.’
Pink asks: ‘does education put too great an emphasis on
extrinsic rewards?
We want pupils to develop their intrinsic motivation.
Which extrinsic factors build intrinsic motivation? For
many of us at school,
our parents’ expectations, encouragement, recognition,
and reinforcement over extended periods
of time helped us internalise our own intrinsic
motivation.
But not all kids can rely on this from home. Some kids
arrive at school without it, demotivated.
It’s an unlevel playing field within and between schools.
So should school systems compensate for that and level
the playing field?
Or does this result in the worst behaved kids getting the
most rewards, rewarding disruption
and disincentivising effort? Schools must avoid the
perverse incentives whereby a kid
who usually doesn’t try gets a reward for trying a
little, once,
and all the kids that try hard all the time get nothing.
If we give too many rewards, kids learn attendance and self-discipline only has value
for these rewards. Giving out sweets and stickers can
actually diminish
motivation.
Yet some schools are spending up to £30,000 on such rewards as ipads, laptops and
games consoles.
Psychology
Psychological studies to demonstrate the ‘over
justification’ effect were conducted
over 40 years ago in 1971 by Edward Deci. The findings
were replicable:
once an activity is associated with an external reward,
people are less inclined to participate
in the activity without a reward present.
Deci summarises the lessons of self-determination theory:
‘Do rewards motivate people? Absolutely.
They
motivate people to get rewards. When people use rewards to
motivate,
that’s when they’re
demotivating. The less salient they are made, the better.’
In Understanding Motivation and
Emotion, Jonmarshall Reeve corroborates this:
“People use rewards expecting
to gain the benefit of increasing another person’s motivation
and behaviour, but in so doing,
they often incur the unintentional and hidden cost
of undermining that person’s
intrinsic motivation toward the activity.”
There is a large body of research on
intrinsic motivation – thanks to Laura McInerney for signposting me to it. Here
is a small sample of hundreds of articles on this, which exposes a striking
paradox:
In a self-fulfilling prophecy
effect, teachers’ beliefs about students’ motivation affected their
behaviour towards students and
their students’ intrinsic motivation.
Tangible rewards substantially undermine intrinsic motivation, especially for
school-age children;
it’s more important to focus on how to
facilitate intrinsic motivation,
ensuring tasks are optimally
challenging.
Teachers are much more
controlling with students they believed to be not motivated.
Teachers are
much more autonomy-supporting when they expect them to be intrinsically
motivated.
Daniel Pink popularised this research in his book, Drive: the surprising truth
about
what motivates us. Although it is mainly aimed at the
adult workplace
(as much of the self-determination research is on
University-age students
rather than school-age pupils), it does draw implications
for schools.
He asks whether ‘we’re bribing students into compliance
instead of challenging them into mastery.’
Pink argues that there is a mismatch between what the
science says and what schools do.
He says what really motivates us is mastery, purpose and autonomy.
Deci‘s psychological research suggests competence, relatedness and autonomy are the
key ingredients, although to my knowledge these are nowhere in the research
split out
and measured for their relative importance.
I’d build on this and suggest that pupils develop their
intrinsic motivation
through three nutrients: mastery, responsibility and relationships.
I think responsibility is a more foundational nutrient
for young primary and secondary school pupils than autonomy; that you can’t be
truly autonomous until you’ve achieved responsibility
for your choices and their consequences.
So what might schools do about intrinsic motivation and
its nutrients?
The moral of the story from social psychology and
behavioural economics is that we might start
by limiting perverse economic incentives with unintended
consequences,
instead applying social incentives. To give a small example, a
signed postcard or personal phone call home connects teachers, tutors and
parents in a way that sweets or ipads do not.
The most motivating factors are getting genuinely better
at something,
and getting recognised by those around us. Mastery and
relationships motivate most.
Developing internal responsibility is much harder, but
much more enduring than giving out prizes.
I wrote last week about the scientific evidence on
developing self-control and willpower.
That research suggests that building self-esteem is a red
herring, and that building self-discipline
is much more important. The conundrum is that teachers
entrust more responsibility
to already motivated pupils, whilst denying motivating
responsibility
to those they expect to be demotivated.
Over the next five weeks,
I’ll suggest five ideas that schools might use to find
their way out of this conundrum.
https://pragmaticreform.wordpress.com/2014/05/17/rewards/
You can TCR software and engineering manuals for spontaneously recall – or pass that exam.
I can Turbo Charge Read a novel 6-7 times faster and remember what
I’ve read.
I can TCR an instructional/academic book around 20 times faster and remember what I’ve read.
Introduction to Turbo Charged Reading YouTube
A
practical overview of
Turbo Charged Reading YouTube
How to choose a
book. A Turbo Charged
Reading YouTube
Advanced Reading Skills Perhaps you’d like
to join my FaceBook group ?
Perhaps you’d like to check
out my sister blogs:
www.innermindworking.blogspot.com
gives many ways for you to work
with the stresses of life
www.ourinnerminds.blogspot.com
take advantage of business experience and expertise.
www.happyartaccidents.blogspot.com
just for fun.
To quote the Dr Seuss
himself, “The more that you read, the more things you will know.
The more that you learn; the
more places you'll go.”
No comments:
Post a Comment
Your opinions, experience and questions are welcome. M'reen