Should Kids Be Bribed to Do Well in School? | Hacker News Reader

Should Kids Be Bribed to Do Well in School?

time.com

17 pointsaraneae29 comments

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.

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.

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...

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.

Upon the realisation that the question is to be framed in terms of money, I would've found a way to out-do the school (or parents, or whichever source of $100/mo) and make more than $100/mo doing something else at the expense of schoolwork just to spite them and make a point. I was a teenager, after all.

If I were a B student before, I would've been a C- minus student as a result, but highly motivated to succeed at revenue-generating activities. :-)

I would guess I'm not the only child who whose basic psychological response to a carrot predicated on an unattractive set of obligations would've been: (a) "Wow, that's really patronising," and (b) "Oh yeah? Well screw your $100. I'll either rationalise why I don't want it anyway and why everyone who goes for that scam is a sucker, or I'll make $200 blowing off schoolwork and laugh."

I would also guess that being paid for achievement in school is attractive to some children because it is novel, unconventional, and socially differentiating. If it became the norm, all the kids that fail to find redemption and/or motivation in mainstream, generally-accepted prescriptions would become ambivalent to it as well. These are often the kids that could use the most academic help, as a practical matter.

Are these the values we want to instill in otherwise ambitious children?

I'm rarely extrinsically motivated so even though I had a cash incentive as a kid to get good grades it made no difference to me. Even if it had, the difference between the action (significant assignments in the semester) and the reward or even evaluation (end of semester) is pretty high and could impede the motivation. Even then, it can't hurt.

On the other hand, teachers are against pay bonuses based on student performance :-/

Not to nitpick, but they found that paying money for grades didn't work at all, probably because kids didn't actually know how to get better grades.

When they paid money for reading books or good attendance, it worked well because kids knew how to accomplish those things. So you might not have gotten better grades because it wasn't clear how to do that.

If your parents had paid you to do specific tasks, like completely your math homework, it might have worked better.

Actually, they paid kids to pass a reading comprehension test based on their comprehension of the books. This caused them to develop reading comprehension skills.

The real difference between this and paying for standardized test scores is that the tests are smaller and more frequent.

This suggests that paying for test scores might work better if the tests were smaller and more frequent. I.e., teach multiplication of 2 digit numbers and then pay students for passing a short test on multiplication.

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

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.

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.

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?

Yeah, but I doubt the average employee cares about the revenue they are generating. They are just glad that they can buy an HDTV and watch it after work.

"Should adults be bribed to do well at work? Of course!"

So what is it you know that disproves the mainstream OB research?

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."

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?!")

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.

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.

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

Moreover, those rewards mostly go to kids from the richest families at present, without genuine regard for "work ethic" or "performance" or whatever else grades are said to reward.

http://www.amazon.com/Wad-Ja-Get-Grading-Game-American-Educa...

How does being challenged by BMX help a kid learn basic reading skills?

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.

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.

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.

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.

I would say it depends on the bribe.

According to the article, rarely.

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.

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

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.

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