Should We Pay Kids To Try Hard?
We may have differing opinions about the advisability of paying kids for good grades (I don’t like the idea), but Steven Levitt of Freakonomics fame has some interesting data on how it affects kids’ performance:
“We use direct financial incentives to motivate so many different activities in life. No one expects workers in a fast food restaurant to flip burgers for free. No one expects teachers to show up and teach without getting paid. But when it comes to kids in school, we think that the distant financial rewards they will earn years or decades later should be enough to motivate them, even though for most kids a month or two feels like an eternity.
To learn a little more about whether kids’ school effort responds to financial incentives, John List, Suzanne Neckermann, Sally Sadoff, and I carried out a series of field experiments we recently wrote up as a working paper.
Unlike most previous studies involving kids, schools, and payments, in this research we aren’t trying to get kids to study hard or learn more; we were going after something even more simple: just get the student to try hard on the test itself. So we don’t tell the kids about the financial reward ahead of time—we just surprise them right before they sit down to take the test by offering them up to $20 for improvements.
To see any gains from the financial incentives, the students need to know that they will be paid right away. If instead we tell them we will pay them one month later, they don’t do any better than with no incentives at all. This is bad news for those who argue that payoffs that come years or decades in the future are sufficient to motivate students.
The very best results come when we give the students the money before the test, and then we take the money back if they don’t meet the standards. This result is consistent with what psychologists call ‘loss aversion.’
With young kids, it is a lot cheaper to bribe them with trinkets like trophies and whoopee cushions, but cash is the only thing that works for the older students.
It is remarkable how offended people get when you pay students for doing well – so many negative emails and comments. [Harvard economist] Roland Fryer endured the same onslaught as he has experimented with financial incentives in cities around the U.S. Many middle-class families pay kids for grades, so why is it so controversial for other people to pay them?” Read more here.
Interested to hear your thoughts on the specifics of Levitt’s study, as well as on the general question of paying students for trying hard or getting good grades. Much better, I think, to make the learning itself engaging enough that kids want to know more and to achieve a sense of mastery. But is that pie-in-the-sky optimism? My kids aren’t old enough to take tests or get grades yet—would love to hear from those of you with older kids.
Interesting post. The challenge I’m having is that the research Levitt and colleagues did is too narrow in scope to draw any conclusions about how advisable the money incentive is one way or the other. For example, it’s entirely possible that there is a short-term boost on the first test where a student is surprised with money just before the test (which is what they found), but then there is a drop in performance on the next test — or tests — when no surprise money is forthcoming (which they didn’t check for). That is, the initial surprise incentive may have re-set the students’ expectations going into future tests, and when they are disappointed just before the test it may be as demotivating as the money was motivating, leading to worse performance on the test than if they had not received money the first time. And that demotivation may last longer. When we are talking about learning and motivation, we have to take a longer-term view than any short-lived transaction like a single test.
Excelent point Michael.
In the discussions of this research, I think the argument of whether or not we SHOULD use tangible incentives for kids has gotten in the way of what I think makes the research really interesting. What is the most fascinating about the study to me is that the relative effectiveness of the money is affected by the immediacy of delivery and the magnitude (amount) of money paid. I think it’s likely that most of us would have expected that money would have been an effective reinforcer, regardless.
The study results are not surprising, really, as there is an enormous body of experimental behavioral literature, including parametric studies, on the effects of immediacy and magnitude of reinforcers. I think what is important about the research here is that it illustrates for a lay readership what many scientists have known for a long time: if it’s intuitive, it’s probably wrong.
Great point, Karen. These conversations around learning science and education tend to slip too easily between “is” and “ought” – though that’s understandable because what everyone wants is tools to improve the system. The science is interesting and useful because it helps explain how the natural world works (the “is”). The explanatory research can’t tell us what to do (how we *ought* to act), though. Explanation and prescription are two hugely different issues. And moving from explanatory science to prescriptive practice-whether in medicine or agriculture or physics or education-is never automatic. Usually it involves a ton of additional work. Scientists in particular need to be careful about not being so casual in speculating about the practical implications of their scientific work. Especially when the scientist’s home domain of expertise (e.g., economics or neuroscience) is not the same as the domain of practice (e.g., formal education).
As a child, my parents did reward me for performing well in school, but they always made it very clear to me that I should be striving to do well for myself rather than for cash.
I think my parents had an interesting spin on the reward system. I was rewarded with potential opportunities, not actual cash. For example, I really wanted to have a television in my room when I was in the sixth grade. While a good number of my friends received cash, I received the opportunity to purchase my own television if I hit certain marks. In other words, I had to perform well to have the opportunity, from there I had to go and earn the money in order to make the purchase.
I think this reward system helped me to learn that learning actually opened doors, not wallets (unless it was my own). This pushed my sight beyond an immediate reward and usually required additional planning and/or sacrifice on my end.