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Why '100% Attendance Awards'
at School Don't Work
100% Attendance
Awards are growing in popularity with most UK primary and secondary schools now
using them to encourage better attendance and less truanting by pupils.
Some schools are
spending upwards of 25K a year on rewards such as IPods, bicycles and Kindles,
and are convinced that the spike in attendance that they invariably produce,
are worth the cost.
The schemes are
not without their critics though, the most vociferous of whom often voice
their concerns
on parenting sites like Netmums and Mumsnet; one parent complained
that these schemes are 'basically rewarding immune systems'
whilst another pointed out
that 'it's wrong
to reward something no one can control - i.e. being ill'.
The real problem
with 100% Attendance Schemes, however, is that they don't work.
I am a firm
believer in encouraging school attendance and discouraging truancy.
In fact, I am
running a project called Your Future, Your Life, (funded by the Paul Hamlyn
Foundation) at the University of Central Lancashire which is an anti-truancy
project.
The project is a
two year initiative consisting of a year's pilot in the North West of England,
before being
rolled out nationally in 2014.
Your Future,
Your Life, is, however, an attendance project with a difference.
There are no
'rewards' given to kids for attending school. The project aims to move away
from
the culture of
trying to motivate kids to attend school by offering them external incentives
like cinema
tickets, trips to themes parks and IPods, and instead looks at the young person
in a holistic
way so as to build up their internal motivation to attend more and aim higher.
We want them to
want to attend school because of the perceived benefits of what happens there,
not in order to get a certificate, badge or pizza.
100% Attendance
Schemes don't work. Not only do they penalise and stigmatise good kids
who have the
misfortune to be ill or have a medical condition,
psychological
'over justification theory' suggests that if we give kids too many external
rewards
for attending
school, they learn that school attendance only has value for these rewards.
Psychologists have long known this; the first studies to demonstrate the 'over justification'
effect were conducted over 40 years ago in 1971. Edward Deci, a Professor of
Psychology at the University of Rochester University in the US, asked students
to solve puzzles for money or for no money.
After the payment
stopped, the researchers noted if the students continued to work on the
puzzles. Those that had received money (an extrinsic motivation for solving the
puzzles) did in fact
become less
inclined to work on the puzzles once they were no longer paid to do so.
The students who
had not been paid (and thus only had intrinsic motivation) continued
to show an
interest in the puzzles.
Deci suggested
that in a situation where an individual is to receive a reward for an activity,
then the
individual would attribute his or her behaviour to the reward instead of the
activity itself. Deci's theory, published in the esteemed Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology,
led to the
hypothesis that once an activity is associated with the external reward,
a person will be
less inclined to participate in the activity in the future without a reward
present.
Attendance
schemes then might get kids to attend more whilst the schemes are in place
(although even that is debatable; the really hard core truants tend not to
respond to these schemes),
but they don't
produce long-term change and nor do they get them to 'attend' whilst they
are attending.
When the prizes stop, attendance rates tend to slip again; a study in 2008
conducted by Maurice Galton and John MacBeath, from Cambridge University, found
"little sign" reward systems led to improvements in pupil behaviour
whilst Emma Dunmore,
head of
psychology at Harrogate Grammar School, North Yorkshire, conducted a study in
2009
into the
effectiveness of reward schemes and found that they produce little long-term
benefit. Indeed, despite the commonplace use of such reward schemes nowadays,
truancy rates in the UK remain at an all-time high; they have failed to fall in
secondary schools whilst rates of truancy
in primary
schools were up 0.6% in 2012.
It's time then,
to ditch these external reward schemes that deliver short-term benefits
but offer little
long-term value. Let's stop punishing kids for being ill
and instead look
at ways to increase engagement and intrinsic motivation for all school
children.
We need to get
kids to attend more in order to aim higher – s
o that they can
eventually buy their own Ipods.
Sandi
Mann
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/sandi-mann/why-100-attendance-awards_b_3414693.html
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