My family and I enjoyed a Netflix movies yesterday, "Freakonomics." I assume many of you may have read the book, or at least heard about it. The film closely follows the book, but actually shows the authors describing and showing the experiments they conducted related to statistics and incentives that drive behavior. In one segment, they work with a school in Chicago to determine if you can turn children into better students with better grades by paying them to do that and providing them with recognition in front of their peers. The short answer is "it works with some of them and not with others." Here is a short YouTube clip related to this segment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8s4qTifYWe4
I encourge you to read the book, see the documentary film, or at least check out some of the YouTube videos about Freakonomics.
Thought-provoking video. I read his first book and loved how it makes one re-think assumptions.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure I agree with the material rewards part - I've read some about the long-term damage it can do. In short, rewards tend to limit performance in many ways - people do just what they have to do to get that reward and then shut down. After school, they often don't perform without reward - I think our incentives ought to be for encouraging life-long learning for personal development and satisfaction
But I do agree with the authors that schools should be doing a lot more to value performance and excellence. There are many ways to do it, without actually resorting to rewards.
Thanks for posting this,
jan
This is a topic we discuss when my students read _The Montessori Method_, the section on punishments and rewards. It's such an interesting topic.
ReplyDeleteMontessori is quite firm about not offering punishments for any academic shortcoming (although disciplinary action is something else). She also argued that prizes for academic triumphs destroy the desire to learn, that we are teaching our students that learning is something so tedious that they must be bribed to do it. It makes for a really interesting discussion. I'm going to watch this movie and see whether we could develop a conversation about both. Thanks for the post!
This is really interesting. I had a grade conscious problem all through school. It wasn't until my senior year of high school my mom told me that I should never work for the grade, I should work to learn......I should focus more on what I can take from each class rather then the grade I end up with. This was really important to me and I wish she told me earlier because up until then, I got straight A's but had nothing to show for it. I didn't really learn anything. I just did what I needed to do to get A's......This is quite a controversial topic! From past experience though, I would say that I would want my kids and students to work hard for themselves not because they can get something out of it.
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