I can't verbalize how relieved I am to have a week of respite from school. It's so liberating and enlightening to do what I want for a week, disregarding the lingering threat of the poetic project I have to complete next week. I've become fairly adept at pardoning my forgetfulness when it comes to schoolwork, and I'm beginning to see it as a lifelong skill. I'm not going to get anything done remembering how much work I have to do, so I might as well forget it and put my mind on other things.
Today was Thanksgiving, and a good one. While my kindred feasted upon eagerly prepared delectables at supper, I pondered quietly at the foot of the table, intermittently looking up from my book. Oftentimes it's more interesting to watch and listen to people in conversation than to take part in it. Anyway, as I listened, I realized what a significant influence environment plays in what we think about and talk about. Increasingly evident, too, was the significant difference between teenager-adult conversation and adult-adult conversion.
Normally when you want to start a conversation, you say what's on your mind at the moment (after filtering it for relevancy and other things). If I see my friend and notice he has a weird looking haircut, I'll ask him about it. But sometimes what's on your mind isn't completely evident to you until you start talking. Conversation seems to prompt the subconscious more than merely thinking can. When people think about something deeply, and are unsure or interested about it, I think they hand it over to a part of their brain they can access later for inquiry. I realized this might be true when I listened to my parents and aunt and uncle talk. They talked about friends we have who have been very successful in raising their kids, dealing with hardships, earning a lot of money, etc. I'm sure that's not what was on the tip of their tongue as they initiated conversation. They somehow got to talking about that subject through subconscious means, from the place where they store interesting information they want to think about or talk about some more. Of course there are triggers, like certain words or ideas, that bring thoughts from long-term memory into working memory, but that's not all that has to happen for someone to input a certain thought into a conversation. The thought has to pass filters. (Filters that judge whether information is relevant to bring up, whether the thought might be offensive toward the listener, whether the listener will really care, how intelligent the listener is, etc.) I think one very interesting filter is one that determines whether the listener will accurately discern what you say--in some cases, the filter that determines the listener's age. I don't mean to say that age correlates with accurate discernment, but to suggest that some device used in developing conversation filters a lot of what is said based on age. This filter is very necessary most of the time, (You wouldn't want to discuss marital problems with a 10 year old) but when this filter is applied, information that could have been put into the conversation and information that could have benefited the listener is never relayed.
I'll use my experience today as an example. My parents started discussing a family that has been very successful in raising kids, dealing with hardships, earning a lot of money, etc. after dinner. They described the conditions and events that led to the family's success, intending to convey the interestingness of the its success. The listeners, my aunt and uncle, were interested in the story and could relate to the way my parents felt. I like to think of this as a successful transaction of fascination. (I don't know what else to call it) If my parents were having a conversation with only me, my parents wouldn't have said the same things about the family. I would have gotten an abridged version of the story. Their filters would have made the story more relevant to me and aimed towards my assumed relatively lower capacity to discern.
I want to make a point that many filters used in conversation are very accurate and useful, but if the filter used to gauge the capacity to discern were made more loose, so to say, teenagers like me could benefit more from adult-teenager conversation. After all, if I hadn't heard the adult-adult conversation, I wouldn't have thought of any of this.
The best example of how inefficient this filter can be is manifest in baby-adult conversation. Sometimes parents feel the need to use elementary language to communicate with their child. Often, it's very appropriate, (The baby obviously wouldn't understand you if you were yelling for it to 'stop being disrespectful and unconcerned' instead of 'stop running around.') but little kids can pick up more than you'd think. Speaking intellectually, or holding an appropriate adult conversation in front of a child, can be a rewarding educational experience for her. Using words she might not know is only going to teach her new words.
It's not a very plausible proposal, but if adults could speak with a more efficient filter--that is, speaking to kids/teenagers as they would adults (within reason)--more people would be benefited and perhaps we'd all grow up faster.
I'm sure tons of people have thought of these same ideas. There are probably psychological terms for them. If anyone knows them, I'd love to know too. And for those people who read these crazy posts, tell me what you think the answers to the questions I ask are, because I don't know and can only speculate. I'd like to hear your thoughts, or read them.
11/25/10
11/2/10
Should Kids Be Bribed to Do Well in School? Well, first we have some things to consider...
I recently read a TIME news article with the title "Should Kids Be Bribed to Do Well in School?"
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1978589-1,00.html
This data is really interesting considering the raft of research conducted on motivation that says this shouldn't happen. For a long time people have thought that money is the ultimate incentive for great performance on a task, but it has been proven to only be true when the task calls for elementary skill. As soon as a task requires even rudimentary cognitive skill, a higher reward yields a poorer performance. As soon as some level of creativity is involved in a task, a high reward can actually hurt performance. RSA Animate has a great video that explains this perfectly. (I put a link at the bottom of this post)
"The most damning criticism of Fryer came from psychologists like the University of Rochester's Edward Deci, who has spent his career studying motivation. Deci has found that money — like other tangible rewards — does not work very well to motivate people over the long term, particularly for tasks that involve creativity. In fact, there is a lot of evidence that rewards can have the perverse effect of making people perform worse.
A classic experiment in support of this hypothesis took place at a nursery school at Stanford University in the early 1970s. There, researchers divided 51 toddlers into groups. All the kids were asked to draw a picture with markers. But one group was told in advance that they would get a special reward — a certificate with a gold star and a red ribbon — in exchange for their work. The kids did the drawings, and the ones in the treatment group got their certificates.
A few weeks later, the researchers observed the children through a one-way mirror on a normal school day. They found that the kids who had received the award spent half as much time drawing for fun as those who had not been rewarded. The reward, it seemed, diminished the act of drawing. So instead of giving kids gold stars, Deci says, we should teach them to derive intrinsic pleasure from the task itself. "What we really want is for people to value the activity of learning," he says. People of all ages perform better and work harder if they are actually enjoying the work — not just the reward that comes later."
Deci says that money "does not work very well to motivate people over the long term, particularly for tasks that involve creativity." It seems like Deci was assuming that the tasks Fryer was incentivizing involved creativity, or else he wouldn't have criticized Fryer. Deci is certainly right about motivation. He's one of the many that have discovered and researched the topic for a long time. Fryer's research didn't contradict Deci's assertion; it built upon it in the other direction and reassured what Dan Pink said: if the task involves straightforward, elementary skill, then monetary incentives DO lead to a better performance.
Economist Ronald Fryer Jr. created an experiment to test whether giving money to students could improve grades and test scores. Fryer found that in some of the schools in which he performed the experiment, the monetized reward had no effect. In many others, however, monetized rewards led to either better grades or better standardized tests scores at the end of the year. (You should read the whole thing; this is just the part I want to discuss.)
This data is really interesting considering the raft of research conducted on motivation that says this shouldn't happen. For a long time people have thought that money is the ultimate incentive for great performance on a task, but it has been proven to only be true when the task calls for elementary skill. As soon as a task requires even rudimentary cognitive skill, a higher reward yields a poorer performance. As soon as some level of creativity is involved in a task, a high reward can actually hurt performance. RSA Animate has a great video that explains this perfectly. (I put a link at the bottom of this post)
This excerpt was actually in the article:
"The most damning criticism of Fryer came from psychologists like the University of Rochester's Edward Deci, who has spent his career studying motivation. Deci has found that money — like other tangible rewards — does not work very well to motivate people over the long term, particularly for tasks that involve creativity. In fact, there is a lot of evidence that rewards can have the perverse effect of making people perform worse.
A classic experiment in support of this hypothesis took place at a nursery school at Stanford University in the early 1970s. There, researchers divided 51 toddlers into groups. All the kids were asked to draw a picture with markers. But one group was told in advance that they would get a special reward — a certificate with a gold star and a red ribbon — in exchange for their work. The kids did the drawings, and the ones in the treatment group got their certificates.
A few weeks later, the researchers observed the children through a one-way mirror on a normal school day. They found that the kids who had received the award spent half as much time drawing for fun as those who had not been rewarded. The reward, it seemed, diminished the act of drawing. So instead of giving kids gold stars, Deci says, we should teach them to derive intrinsic pleasure from the task itself. "What we really want is for people to value the activity of learning," he says. People of all ages perform better and work harder if they are actually enjoying the work — not just the reward that comes later."
Deci says that money "does not work very well to motivate people over the long term, particularly for tasks that involve creativity." It seems like Deci was assuming that the tasks Fryer was incentivizing involved creativity, or else he wouldn't have criticized Fryer. Deci is certainly right about motivation. He's one of the many that have discovered and researched the topic for a long time. Fryer's research didn't contradict Deci's assertion; it built upon it in the other direction and reassured what Dan Pink said: if the task involves straightforward, elementary skill, then monetary incentives DO lead to a better performance.
What I want to point out is that whether or not he knows it or chooses to recognize it, Fryer is proving that the tasks he's incentiviting in the schools are not creative tasks. If they were creative tasks, then the students' performances surely would not be better. If anything, they would be worse. The students in the experiments were definitely not doing anything they had an initiative to do on their own. They had to be given money to do it. You can't force a student to be creative. Yes, I know that Fryer probably wasn't trying to prove anything about creativity in schools, but he certainly did.
Perhaps there are people who believe that doing non-creative activities in school is the way to educate our kids--those people are few and far between. (I've always wanted to say that.) But for those people who know that creativity is the thing we need to allow and encourage to happen in schools, here's some more proof that it's not happening.
People who are creative and curious are going to find a way to learn. It's irrefutable. Instead of letting kids take the first stair--creativity and curiosity--we're trying to make them take the second stair, which is the love of learning and the knowledge of how to learn. We have to let them take the first stair before we make them take the second.
"When researchers asked them how they could raise their scores, the kids mentioned test-taking strategies like reading the questions more carefully. But they didn't talk about the substantive work that leads to learning. 'No one said they were going to stay after class and talk to the teacher,' Fryer says. 'Not one.'"
"When researchers asked them how they could raise their scores, the kids mentioned test-taking strategies like reading the questions more carefully. But they didn't talk about the substantive work that leads to learning. 'No one said they were going to stay after class and talk to the teacher,' Fryer says. 'Not one.'"
RSA Animate - Motivation