On 9 Feb 2006 at 12:46, Beth Benoit wrote: > > The following appeared in the New York Times: > I shared the story with my students, and they were curious to know if this > program is being used anywhere besides the places mentioned in the article.
Interpreting "this program" in a generic sense, and going beyond staying clean to becoming smart, I can offer a news report some years ago about a reward programme at a notorious British school, _The Ridings_. School test performance improved when the students were offered cash for attendance. A brief article about it is at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/1675534.stm (although I see that a more recent news item suggests that the school has again slipped into the notorious category, although it doesn't say whether the reward programme was still in effect). Also, Judy Cameron at the University of Alberta was reported in a news item to be doing something similar. I wrote her in 2002, and she confirmed that she had a project underway on the effect of paying students for achievement, but told me it wasn't yet in print. I think this may be it (below). But note that it's a laboratory study rather than a real-world intervention. Cameron has been in the forefront in the struggle against the claim that "token rewards lead to token learning". The abstract below suggests sometimes yes, sometimes no. Stephen Rewards, Task Difficulty, and Intrinsic Motivation: A Test of Learned Industriousness Theory Author Cameron, Judy; Pierce, W David; So, Sylvia Source Alberta Journal of Educational Research. Vol 50(3), Fal 2004, pp. 317-320 Abstract The purpose of this research was to examine how rewards affected motivation and performance when students were rewarded for succeeding at an easy task versus a moderately difficult task. As part of a more general design, the experiment reported here was a 2x2 factorial with two levels of reward (reward, no reward) and two levels of task difficulty (easy, difficult). Seventy-three undergraduate university students were randomly assigned to conditions and asked to work on three sets of five Find the Difference (FID) problems that were programmed onto Macintosh computers. In a learning phase, participants in the low task difficulty condition were required to find two differences in each problem; those in the moderately high difficulty condition had to find four differences. In the reward conditions, participants were offered and given $2.00 for each set of five problems they successfully passed; the no reward groups were not offered or given money. The results indicate that performance on a test and intrinsic motivation increased when rewards were given for succeeding at a moderately difficult task. Rewards given for achievement on a task of low difficulty reduced performance and motivation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2005 APA, all rights reserved) ___________________________________________________ Stephen L. Black, Ph.D. ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Department of Psychology Bishop's University Lennoxville, QC J1M 1Z7 Canada Dept web page at http://www.ubishops.ca/ccc/div/soc/psy TIPS discussion list for psychology teachers at http://faculty.frostburg.edu/psyc/southerly/tips/index.htm _______________________________________________ --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
