RSSWe Shouldn’t Have to Pay Kids to Learn
March 11th, 2008 | View Comments
You might have heard of various pilot programs around the country to see if paying kids for grades will improve test scores. I tend to agree with The Frontal Cortex’s take on it, with a few additional comments.
First, this is not actually a new idea. It’s being implemented in the schools for the first time, yes, but plenty of my classmates’ parents paid them for making good grades when I was growing up. Second, I don’t think it’s that far off from what happens in adulthood anyways. I’d guess that for the vast majority of people, getting paid is a big part of the reason why they go to work.
A few of Jonah’s commenters have mentioned the overjustification effect, which basically says that adding an external motivator, like money, can destroy your intrinsic motivation to do something. The most commonly-used example is that of volunteer work. You initially start volunteering for an organization because you believe in the cause. Eventually, they stick you on staff and you start getting paid for your work. But the organization hits some rough finances and can’t afford to do that any more. In this situation, many people will walk away from the organization rather than go back to what they used to do — work for free. That’s overjustification.
I don’t think overjustification is really in play here, because presumably we’re talking about kids who’ve already lost the intrinsic motivation to learn, if they ever had it to begin with.
And therein lies the problem — I don’t think standard curricula do a very good job of showing students the truly interesting parts of the subject matter.
Take math, for instance. Math is usually taught as a series of disconnected facts and procedures. The brightest students are able to extract some of the underlying structure for themselves, but the rest of the students swim in a morass of arbitrary-seeming numbers and operations.
And they repeatedly solve problems that are asinine. Take this story problem that I found in a recent analysis of a geometry curriculum:
You are making tickets for a school talent show. You decide to make the ticket in the shape of a parallelogram… Find the area of the parallelogram.
Or how about this one?
You are making appetizers for a dinner party. The top of the appetizer is a triangle… Find the area of the triangle.
Yes, because when I’m cooking, I always stop to calculate the surface area of my food.
If you’re good at math, maybe you’ll just solve the problems without thinking about the story too much, but if you’re not, this just re-affirms the feeling that Math Is Stupid Anyways.
Maybe I’m biased, as I was a math major, but I think math has an inherent coolness to it—it’s the language of perfection. How about showing students how that works, instead of hiding it in these ridiculous cover stories?
Yvonne posted this on March 11th, 2008 @ 1:02pm in Education, Mathematics, Psychology/Neuroscience | Permalink to "We Shouldn’t Have to Pay Kids to Learn"
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1. Jane Chin » March 11th, 2008 at 5:32 pm
Scary… now they’re teaching KIDS to follow money first.