For the past several years, I have read studies about merit pay and “pay-for-performance.” Merit pay has been tried again and again for over a hundred years, and it has never “worked.” I became convinced that merit pay never works because, first, there is no evidence that it has ever worked, and two, the best it can produce is marginally higher test scores but not necessarily better education. Students can be trained like seals to get the right answer by using various strategies, but that doesn’t mean they are better educated.
Typically, studies of merit pay programs show that teachers offered a bonus for higher scores are not likely to produce higher scores than teachers who were not offered a bonus. Teachers are not hiding their best lessons, waiting for someone to offer them a bonus for higher scores. I remember Al Shanker saying, sardonically, “So if you offer teachers a bonus, students will work harder.”
The best book I found on the subject, which spurred other books, was Edward L. Deci’s “Why We Do What We Do.” Deci, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester, subsequently inspired the work of Daniel Pink (“Drive”) and Dan Ariely (“Predictably Irrational”). He and Ariely served on the panel of the National Academies of Science that produced a report, “Incentives and Test-Based Acoountability,” which concluded that neither strategy improves education.
Deci conducted a number of studies with human subjects in which to test his theories. He concluded that when you pay people to do what they want to do anyway, you lessen their intrinsic motivation. When you stop paying them, they stop doing what they would have done without the bonus. People are motivated intrinsically by autonomy and authenticity. “Self-motivation,” he wrote, “is at the heart of creativity, responsibility, healthy behavior, and lasting change.”
It is one thing to read books about motivation. It is another to test it in your own life.
About two years ago, I discovered “Words with Friends,” a computer game that you play with friends and strangers online. It took a while, but soon I get the hang of it and found myself enjoying it immensely. I learned new words like “za” and “xu.”
At some point I realized that I could earn digital badges if I reached a certain number of points within a set number of days. I was very motivated to win the badges, even though they had no value whatsoever. I began fervently collecting badges. I started playing with strangers so I could collect more points by playing more often. At one point, I was very close to earning a badge but none of my friends was online. So I sent an email to Anthony Cody and asked him to please start playing so I could earn points. Anthony, by the way, is a master of the game and regularly beats me. He knows more exotic words than anyone else I know.
Then I learned something. When I earned a badge, I lost interest in playing the game until a new badge was offered.
In other words, I proved Deci’s theory. I began with intrinsic motivation, but the badges converted my desire to play into a competitive race to earn a digital badge. When I won the digital badge, or when it was clearly out of reach, I lost interest.
I tried to play without paying attention to the digital badge, but the App kept reminding that I had earned 25% of the points or 50% of the points needed.
There is no way to turn off the badges.
The badges damaged my love of the game. I was no longer playing it for the fun of making words, but for the badges.
Since writing this post, I stopped caring about winning badges. I no longer look at my scores. I am dropping the strangers I play with. Writing the post has helped to break the addiction. I am playing for the fun of the game, not for the prize.
Deci was right.
“It is one thing to read books about motivation. It is another to test it in your own life.”
HURRAH for subjective experience and common sense!!! Gnothi seauton.
Alfie Kohn has an amusing anecdote in one of his books. An older, rather pudgy, balding man had to walk to work every day past a group of kids who would gather and throw insults at him as he passed. One day he calls the kids together and offers to pay them a dollar each if they’ll come insult him the next day. The kids are, predictably, amazed and thrilled at the offer, so hordes of them gather the next day and throw out their best insults. As promised, the man pays them a dollar each. Then he tells them that he’d like them to come back the next day, but he can only afford 50 cents each. Well, the kids are kind of bummed about the pay cut, but they agree anyway. The next day another large crowd gathers, but the insults seem a bit half-hearted. The man tells them to come back the next day, but now he can only afford a quarter each. A much smaller, practically lifeless crowd gathers the next day. Then the man tells them that he can’t afford to pay them any more, but he’d love for them to insult him anyway. “What?!” the kids exclaim, “you want us to do this for free???”
[Note, I don’t have my copy of the book with me, so the above is paraphrased.]
Good one.
Deci or Ariely did an experiment with lawyers. They asked a large number to represent indigent clients for free. Many volunteered.
They asked another group if they would represent indigent clients for half their usual fee.
No one took the offer.
Well said! On the other hand, the opportunity to successfully influence, and enhance, the characteristics of the team with which one collaborates seems sometimes underappreciated as a motivational factor with potentially benign results.
Re “merit pay” If teachers were motivated by money (substantially or primarily) would they have become teachers in the first place. Teaching is (or was) a job with high social esteem but low pay. It doesn’t attract people who are motivated by money. They go into sales, or trading stocks, or real estate, or the law, or … but not teaching.
On Mon, Aug 28, 2017 at 10:00 AM, Diane Ravitch’s blog wrote:
> dianeravitch posted: “For the past several years, I have read studies > about merit pay and “pay-for-performance.” Merit pay has been tried again > and again for over a hundred years, and it has never “worked.” I became > convinced that merit pay never works because, first, there is” >
Sadly, teaching is not held in high esteem by all members of our society. “Those who can, do. Those who can’t teach. Those who can’t teach, run the public school systems”.
In one respect, teaching is like most public employment. There is no money in it.
Our society rewards some professions with higher pay. Good engineers are always in demand. Excellent engineers earn more than lousy engineers.
I would have no problem at all, with rewarding our best teachers with a higher salary.
I earned “danger pay” ,when I served in Iraq/Afghanistan (civilian). I would have no objection at all, to paying teachers in inner-city schools additional pay for the dangers they face.
Those who can, teach.
Those who can’t, pass laws telling teachers how to teach.
Exactly, Diane!
The colleague who is returning to Afghanistan again this year told me when she returned in January, “Sometimes Afghanistan is safer than (name of school)!” At least she got combat pay for that!
Charles, I found a comment from KrazyTA that include a quote from Aristotle, which gives the origins of all the “those that can” ditties. I like his version.
Kohn also has a big issue with those get-a-pizza-for-reading-a-book programs for the same reason. He says we should instead give kids a book for every pizza they eat.
Roland Fryer is very big on giving rewards for test scores and grades.
He tried experiment after experiment.
No success.
Then he hit on a new theory: aversive incentives. Give a reward but then take it away if the subject doesn’t meet the goal.
Dr. Ravitch: Vygotsky was a cognitivist, but rejected the assumption made by cognitivists such as Piaget and Perry that it was possible to separate learning from its social context. While “strangers” were not your primary social group the “strangers” were a secondary social group and thus less satisfying. Material reward was not a sufficient addition to success your motivation to participate in a less important to you social group you labeled strangers.
Thank you for sharing this…I too have noticed that sometimes its the rewards that catch me (for me – the kryptonite is Starbucks offering to make purchases over a given week to get bonus stars for free drinks)…I also read the work you cited and agree that merit pay/bonuses for test scores is not the main answer – and that we need to offer supports for students, etc.
No wonder jls, that I didn’t get a response to my offer of buying you a drink if you’re gonna be at the NPE conference. . . I took away your favorite drink ahead of time. That or you didn’t see my offer, eh! Or just didn’t care to respond.
Beware of clever, manipulative young people that will learn how to game the system. My son has a very good mind. Despite being read to from the time he opened his eyes, he was never interested in fiction. He always gravitated to non-fiction. from the time he was three. He wanted me to read a book about the bones of the body, how the pyramids were built or some other historical summary.
When he went to school, the school district offered “Accelerated Reader” via computer. He would come home with lots of “points,” from “Accelerated Reader.” When I would ask me about some of the books he had read, it was clear he had not read the books. He had figured out how to game the system. He is not unique. Lots of other young people will figure out how to acquire badges without doing the work.
Great stuff. The state standardized tests belong to a discredited extrinsic reward model for learning. The students in our classes today are going to live in a world that will change more in their lifetimes than it has in all of history to this time. It’s extraordinarily important that a great many of them become autonomous, intrinsically motivated, flexible, life-long learners. Turning our schools into rat labs in which kids move from one reward to another is not going to help us to accomplish that–quite the opposite.
Here, a great video in which Daniel Pink discusses what we’ve learned about extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation–that extrinsic motivators are commonly disincentivizing for cognitive tasks:
Thank you, Bob.
Isn’t this reward-via-badging/addictive approach exactly what the edupreneurs are pushing on schools and students as part of the digital juggernaut of algorithmically mediated “teaching/learning?” This post clinches the counter-productive nature of this agenda if the goal is self-actualized adults.
AMEN, Sheila! AGREE.
With extrinsic rewards, the only thing that matters is STUFF and eventual emptiness.
TRUTH: Those DEFORMERS want non-thinking SLAVES. Carrots and sticks only work for a short time, then after a while, people just get angry and/or lose themselves.
Shouldn’t we help our young find pleasure and rewards in themselves, not from the ring master? And boy do we have more than a 3 ring circus.
A PDF of the full report is available for free from the National Academies Press. You have the option of registering or downloading as a guestm here:
https://www.nap.edu/read/12521/chapter/1
Being somewhat oppositional, I ignored the badges from jump. I played a bunch of strangers at first to learn the game, but now only play people I actually know and care about, using the message feature to chat a bit from time to time. Welcome to the ranks of those who play only for fun and social contact. What’s the most interesting for me is putting up a bunch of letters and finding out that I’ve made an actual word I’d never heard of – and I was an English major and teacher!
It all comes back to basic human nature. People prize their autonomy. Extrinsic reward systems rob them of that, and they rebel against it. Imagine a wealthy person hiring someone to clean his or her home and then standing over that person, all the time, saying, “No. Move the cloth in circles. Use less water on the mop. You missed a spot.” Extraordinarily disincentivizing. Well, the extrinsic reward says, very clearly, “This task is so onerous, so dull, so uninteresting that to get you do to it, I have to offer you a gold star.” And it teaches that that’s what you should be after–not the goals of your projects but the gold star collection. NOT what we need to be teaching our kids.
We’ve turned our schools into rat labs run by numerologists.
Of course, not all extrinsic rewards and punishments are created equal–social ones are a very different case. If people will LIKE YOU MORE because you are good at Algebra, that is actually incentivizing. But that’s not the case in most of our high schools.
Why are extrinsic social rewards incentivizing where gold stars and standardized test points aren’t? Well, because those are deeply personal–people care personally about them.
The “gamification of education” is one aspect of the effort to shove apps and software into schools, call it personalized learning while teaching lessons about competition not unlike those Diane reports in this blog.
Here is a recent study, and not the only one, where the gamification feature does not produce gains in learning.
Computers & Education
Volume 80, January 2015, Pages 152-161 by Michael D. Hanus and Jesse Fox
Gamification, the application of game elements to non-game settings, continues to grow in popularity as a method to increase student engagement in the classroom.
We tested students across two courses, measuring their motivation, social comparison, effort, satisfaction, learner empowerment, and academic performance at four points during a 16-week semester.
One course received a gamified curriculum, featuring a leaderboard and badges, whereas the other course received the same curriculum without the gamified elements.
Our results found that students in the gamified course showed less motivation, satisfaction, and empowerment over time than those in the non-gamified class. The effect of course type on students’ final exam scores was mediated by students’ levels of intrinsic motivation, with students in the gamified course showing less motivation and lower final exam scores than the non-gamified class.
This suggests that some care should be taken when applying certain gamification mechanics to educational settings.
I scanned several other studies. Middle school students, for example, showed initial interest in game-like presentations of content, but they lost interest in the “do this and get a badge, or try again” formula thinly disguised as quests or adventures.
Younger students in gamified classrooms are learning less about content and more about their status relative to peers in a computer display and dashboard environment that is the equivalent of a class list with stars for “good students” and nothing at all for others. The great variation is gold, silver, and bronze stars. The badge system for “competency based personalized education” is marketed as if revolutionary. I think not.
I’ve seen this again and again, Laura. The kids are interested for the first half hour, and then they become bored, and then they become vocally disdainful and groan loudly whenever the program is mentioned. They very rapidly get hip to the fact that if you peel back the glitzy surfaces of these edutainment programs, all you have is worksheets on a screen. After a week, they HATE them with a passion and will do anything to keep from having to spend time with on them.
So, the programs do in fact motivate them. LOL.
l like your conclusion below So, the programs do in fact motivate them. LOL.
The law of unintended consequences.
We don’t need no stinking badges!
Gotta love that one, Roy!
For those that enjoy playing games, join a local chess club and sit at a table with a chess board between the two of you. While playing, get to know the other person. For that to happen, turn off your smart phone, tablet, laptop, or whatever device that keeps you linked to the internet when you leave your home.
I have a dumb phone and I don’t text. When I leave home, my desktop is turned off and I leave the internet that turns us into mindless slaves behind. If I could buy a dump car, I would, but all the new cars are smart cars with all kinds of crap I seldom bother with. And all that high tech crap that links our cars to the worldwide web has caused the price of cars to climb.
Don’t play chess through the internet.
Don’t play cards through the internet.
Don’t let your children become addicted to internet video games or video games on DVDs.
We are losing the ability to make real friends face to face, and do not forget that studies show that 70 percent or more of communication is non-verbal and non-verbal (body language, facial expressions, etc.) vanish through the internet.
Also, if you have children, eat at least one meal a day together at the same table with no electrionic devices turned on. The only thing to do during the family meal is to eat and talk to each other face to face.
Families that live together are becoming strangers because of texting and streaming. Instead of sitting down to watch TV together for an hour or two each week, most members of families are scattered in the same house doing something different with help from the internet or a video game machine.
We are fast becoming a nation of strangers even when we live in the same house with our parents and siblings.
“I have a dumb phone and I don’t text. When I leave home, my desktop is turned off and I leave the internet that turns us into mindless slaves behind. If I could buy a dump car,”
Amen Brother Lloyd!
Certainly describes my situation. I did manage to buy a truck quite a bit ago that has roll up windows, a radio and air conditioning. Not much else though. No fancy electronic stuff in that 07 Silverado that has many dents and scratches. But it works great for what I need. Hauling a canoe down to the river or going down the road to my neighbors and hanging out shooting the breeze til the deer decide to come out, the owls start to hoot and the moon shines overhead. It gets me to the docs and grocery store and back fine enough. Hell, it’s been to both the east and west coast of this country, no problem.
Something to be said for simplicity!
I mourn the loss of roll-up windows. My husband periodically broke the cranks trying to roll down frozen windows. Silly man. He had trouble learning to finesse them. Now the automatic ones are a pain in the tush. I can’t count the number of times I have been unable to open a frozen window although I have now learned to turn the air vents on them and blast them with warm air. I have always worried about whether I would be able to roll down a window before the electronics quit in the event of a water landing. There is something not terribly smart about making some things people proof.
Big-5 sells a folding knife that comes with a slotted blade designed to cut seat belts and the other end has a hard metal point designed to easily break car windows in the event you can’t get the window down and have to get out of the car quick. I keep one in my car all the time in the center console.
And that concept of simplicity can easily be applied to a classroom.
Yes, try offering a certain kind of candy to kids when playing a game. If the teacher should change candy brand or forget to bring the reward, it causes resentment toward the teacher and the game itself that they would have gladly played for no reward if the teacher hadn’t started candy rewards in the first place. So scores go up one year and the teacher gets merit pay and they go down the next. Then what?
You should try SCRABBLE sometime– ever hear of it!? Word with friends is a pale not-very-good imitation JMHO of course! Other than that (WWF v Scrabble) I agree with you on everything though Diane!
Courtesy of KrazyTA :
“Those that know do. Those that understand, teach.” ~Aristotle
Do you remember what text, speduktr?
Sorry, I don’t have that information. Maybe KrazyTA can help you.
I did a little research and, sadly, it appears that Aristotle, sob, did not say it: https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100823190727AA5E5ZR
This is not the best of references, but there are several others. I do like that the article mentioned something he had said, and there was a comment that identified as a possible paraphrase from Metaphysics.
Yeah, Deci is right.
There are these forums on the Internet where people can ask questions about various stuff and experts from all over the world try to answer them. In my case, I mostly ask questions about various computer programming issues. In the past, this worked extremely well. For example, people complain about bad commercial computer software support, while in case of open software, once you asked a question, answers and even bug fixes came in within minutes. This is still the case but in the last couple of years I noticed that some of the people who answered gave hardly comprehensible answers and then became very defensive if other people asked for clarification or gave a better answer.
So I looked around, and quickly realized, that these forums started giving out points and various titles, badges for answers, and the more popular your answer (more views it gets), the more points and badges you can collect. In fact, even popular questions get points and badges.
As a result, now there are (even heated) arguments about who answered what, which questions are just copies of another one, etc. These forums are still much better than commercial support, but I am truly worried about where this is heading.
Before these scoring systems, people who answered questions, gave advice well still got a good reputation in the “natural way”: people read their useful answers and started trusting them. Now you have a system measuring reputation by numbers, and the whole thing is becoming a competition.
I hope, you, Diane, will never set up a scoring system for good comments or measure the frequency of posts by an individual.
Mate,
Never fear. There will never be digital badges here!