The New York Times on Saturday had exactly a story on rewarding students
for attending school. The catchy title "And for perfect attendance,
Johnny gets .... a car" refers to actual events! The article nicely
describes what happened a one school when rewards were established (for
attending) but penalties (for absences) were removed.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/education/05reward.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Marie
Stephen Black wrote:
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
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Marie Helweg-Larsen, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Psychology
Dickinson College, P.O. Box 1773
Carlisle, PA 17013
Office: (717) 245-1562, Fax: (717) 245-1971
Webpage: www.dickinson.edu/~helwegm
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