
Should Kids Be Bribed to Do Well in School? - araneae
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1978589-1,00.html
======
rfrey
Say for a moment that there are lots of students like jrockway for whom this
would work. Give 'em $100 and they go from B to A students.

So what? Why do we want more A students? Space in universities is a scarce
resource and grades are a sucky predictor of success there already. Why make
them suckier by increasing the number of people not intrinsically motivated by
the subject?

It keeps more people in school? Doubtful, since once you move to cash you're
competing with the work force. But even if it did, again, so what? Reluctant
scholars aren't made into better people by an extra year of school. If
anything they're worse since they're delaying engaging in something they might
enjoy, whether it's welding or carpentry or just entering the adult world.

~~~
ctkrohn
The difference is that in the article, the experiments were all done at
failing schools. The cash wasn't to make B students into A students; it was
merely to get kids to read at all, or to achieve a baseline score on a
standardized test.

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ErrantX
It doesn't work very well here in the UK. Here kids are paid from 16 to 18 to
stay in education (and attend) - it's silly for 3 reasons:

\- Everyone games the system to make money while avoiding school.

\- It's not awarding achievement but attendance

\- More importantly it helps expand the stigma to leaving school at 16

With that said... My Mum is a teacher and believe me: School is all about
bribing kids to learn. Doing that with cash? I can't see how you could get it
to work in a way that _stimulates learning_.

Just to blow my own trumpet for a moment, I have my own take on a solution to
stimulating education:

[http://www.errant.me.uk/blog/2010/04/an-educational-
startupa...](http://www.errant.me.uk/blog/2010/04/an-educational-startupapp-
idea/)

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jrockway
Should adults be bribed to do well at work?

Of course! So why not with kids in school?

Throughout high school and middle school, I was mostly a B student. If I got
$100 a month to be an A student, I definitely would have been. A few hours
more of studying and I would be able to buy myself stuff I wanted? Fuck yes.

~~~
mynameishere
Adults are paid x because they generate some revenue greater than x. That's
why. Not to give the employer the warm fuzzies.

~~~
jackowayed
But you could argue that society (the "employer" here) will benefit a lot from
having smart, well-trained workers who keep high-paying jobs in America and
such. It also might allow them to roll back some of the budget increases that
were meant to increase performance but failed.

So though they're not generating the revenue now, they might save some money
now by being able to succeed in a cheaper-to-run school, and they'll generate
lots of tax revenue later if America stays the economic powerhouse that it is
instead of having a lot of those jobs move to Europe and China and India.

~~~
wdewind
Straight A students != smart, educated workers. The majority of students
coming out of 4 years of college, regardless of GPA, have little to no
understanding of what actual productive work is without being told what to do
(little executive function).

Kids should not be bribed to do school work. If you have to bribe by
definition we are doing something wrong. What's needed here is a refactoring
of incentives.

We should absolutely be paying kids, but they should be generating value. It's
never too early to understand what generating value is, and everyone can
create value (side note: profits are correlated to value now, but they are not
causally related. We should work on that). Starting to work is a really
important part of education, and shouldn't be thought of as what education is
training you to do.

Edit: And I don't think it should be like this, but generally speaking if you
get good grades you'll have a relatively easier time in life and higher paying
jobs so in that regard kids already are being bribed to get good grades they
are just too stupid to see it.

~~~
jackowayed
I agree that straight A students aren't necessarily smart, educated workers,
but I do think that if you get the kids to learn more from school, you'll end
up with more smart, educated workers than you would have.

And yes, it is true that getting straight A's, going to a good college, etc
all make life easier and better for kids (in general). But it's hard to get
people, especially kids, to see that long-range. In second grade, was getting
into a good college a factor in how hard you tried whatsoever?

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frederickcook
Summary:

"If you pay a kid to read books, their grades go up higher than if you
actually pay a kid for grades, like we did in Chicago," Fryer says. "Isn't
that cool?"

"Kids may respond better to rewards for specific actions because there is less
risk of failure. They can control their attendance; they cannot necessarily
control their test scores. The key, then, may be to teach kids to control more
overall — to encourage them to act as if they can indeed control everything,
and reward that effort above and beyond the actual outcome."

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chasingsparks
It might work; it's a good experiment; but it's dangerous. I'd lean in favor
of the Deci argument against "cheapening" the reward system for learning. The
author seems to disagree. He closes with:

    
    
       I ask her about the psychologists' argument that she 
       should work hard for the love of learning, not for 
       short-term rewards. "Honestly?" she asks. 
       "Yes, honestly," I say. She looks me dead in the eye. 
       "We're kids. Let's be realistic."
    

I think that it is a bad closing. No matter how intelligent you are, there is
something that challenges you that you find rewarding -- sports, math, BMX,
etc. The problem with education -- pointed out by the iceland article from
earlier this week that I can't find -- might be that children are not given
appropriate challenges. Incremental advancement by grades seems ugly and
woefully imprecise. Some students are learning far behind their levels; some,
far ahead. the former students learn to hate learning; the latter are bored.

So again, good experiment, but cause for concern. I'd be more interested in
experiments that educate kids by intellectual level, not years in the school
system. (Although, admittedly, parents are the obstacle. "What?! Billy's not
in the highest class?!")

~~~
araneae
The thing is, schools already use a reward system. What do you think a grade
_is_? An A is like a gold star.

Yes, obviously if a kid is doing something for pleasure, you should continue
to let them do it for pleasure. But if they aren't doing anything to begin
with, no amount of waiting around for them to discover they'll like it will
work. You need a stick or a carrot. And in schools, they have been using
sticks and carrots from the very beginning. This was just a study on what is
an effective carrot.

And rewards don't completely kill your intrinsic rewards. I loved reading as a
kid, and I also participated in those summer reading programs. I got lots of
prizes, and I still loved reading. The studies show that rewards do diminish
intrinsic rewards, but to what extent? Maybe it's worth mildly damaging some
children's intrinsic rewards in order to encourage kids without that
motivation.

Remember, their studies found that the rewards showed the greatest improvement
in some of the lowest performing students. The ones that are intrinsically
motivated are probably already at the top, so public schools are less
concerned about them.

~~~
timwiseman
_The thing is, schools already use a reward system. What do you think a grade
is? An A is like a gold star._

Yes, but you have to care about the reward for it to make a difference. Those
targeting competitive colleges and going for competitive scholarships will
care very much about the grades, the rest will only care about pass or fail.
At least that is the impression I got when I was going to high school.

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timwiseman
_So instead of giving kids gold stars, Deci says, we should teach them to
derive intrinsic pleasure from the task itself._

Naturally, but that's a hard thing to do. I enjoyed calculus, I found "The
Last of the Mohicans" incredibly boring. I am not sure I could have found any
way to make "The last of the Mohicans" remotely interesting.

If you cannot create an intrinsic reward in the minds of the children,
providing external rewards seems to make a great deal of sense to me.

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wallflower
I've had this discussion many times with friends. We believe it all comes down
to the personal investment in the child's education made by the parent(s). How
much they care and most importantly, how much time they spend being involved
with their child's learning. It's not about how much money the school district
has, how rich the kid's parents are (good test: are the cars in the faculty
parking cheaper than the ones the students drive), how much is spent on
tutoring. It's up to the parents to emphasize (or de-emphasize) how important
learning is.

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SlyShy
Definitely. Adam Smith's _The Wealth of Nations_ was an exploration of how
society could be structured to incentivize moral behavior. Schools should be
structured to incentivize education.

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Avshalom
From the article it sound like a pretty solid study, other than the phrasing:

"Grades are subjective. The more objective measure would come at the end of
the year, when the students took their standardized tests"

Though from the sounds of results that's just poor wording more than an actual
claim that standardized testing is a Good Thing.

I think the most important results can be summed up as:

rewards work best when coupled with things that students can control (in
context, not as vacuous as it sounds) and rewards should follow the actions
fairly quickly.

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jister
I would say it depends on the bribe.

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d_c
According to the article, rarely.

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Dove
This article has too much story fluff.

tldr:

\------------------------------

The experiment: pay kids for performance and measure improvement in skills
with a standardized test. Four payment schemes were chosen, to be implemented
in four different cities. Schools within the city were randomly assigned to
the control or experimental group.

In New York, 4th graders were paid $25 for good test scores, 7th graders $50.
The article does not say how frequent the tests were, but the average student
earned ~$180 over what looks like a school year. No effect on scores vs. the
control group.

In Chicago, 9th graders were paid "$50 for each A, $35 for a B and $20 for a
C, up to $2,000 a year," and half of their income went into an account
redeemable at high school graduation. The kids got better grades compared to
the control group, but their skills--as measured by standardized test--did not
improve.

The article is vague about Washington. It says, "In Washington, middle
schoolers would be paid for a portfolio of five different metrics, including
attendance and good behavior. If they hit perfect marks in every category,
they could make $100 every two weeks." The kids "did better on standardized
reading tests."

In Dallas, second graders were paid $2 for every book they successfully read
and answered a quiz about. The kids did significantly better in the
standardized reading-comprehension test, and a year later--after the rewards
stopped--their scores were _still_ higher compared to the control group.

\------------------------------

That's an awful lot of variables they changed from city to city. Off the top
of my head, I see

    
    
      - Age of the students
    
      - Whether we're rewarding performance, grades, or improved behavior
    
      - Frequency of the reward
    
      - Delay between achievement and payment
    
      - How much direct control the student had over their performance
    
      - Level of initiative in student participation
    

It strikes me as unsurprising that the Dallas experiment was successful. The
reward was for drilling the key skill (reading comprehension) opposed to an
auxiliary like grades or behavior. The payment was immediate (kids are bad at
delayed gratification), opposed to days or even years later. Students had good
control over payoff for their efforts; reading a book and understanding it is
concrete, while studying for a test when you don't know exactly what's on it
is abstract. And the whole thing driven by initiative on the part of the
_student_ , instead of an administratively mandated test schedule. Those
choices all seem to me to be better than the alternatives.

I do think the immediate feedback for solving concrete problems is important.
Kids are like puppies. They need feedback FAST for something they UNDERSTAND
and can CONTROL, or the lesson is greatly diminished.

If I were to generalize the success, I would recommend a standing offer to pay
students to drill skills directly by solving concrete problems, with payment
to be made _immediately_ upon problem resolution. You could scale it down to a
penny per trivial arithmetic sum, or up to $200 for solving any of a list of
independent research or engineering challenges.

I also find the success in Washington particularly interesting. I'd speculate
about kids learning to respect school or secondary effects from an improved
learning environment, but . . . really I wish I could see their metrics.

~~~
mukyu
I wish I had read your summary instead of the actual story. It really bothers
me how they never just get to the point.

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clammer
Yeah, as a kid I would do almost anything for money. The interesting thing was
when my father offered me money for performance in sports, I often delivered
when normally I couldn't.

When I was 8, I was offered $25 for each goal scored in my next hockey game. I
got a hat-trick...that was the first and last time I got that offer and the
only goals I scored that year.

