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
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