Seattle Times: Should Learning Be its Own Reward?

katonahmom
Tue, 21 Nov 2006 10:25:43 +0000

“No, it shouldn’t”

Well, I think a lot of educators are beginning to think that while learning ought to be its own reward it isn’t and can’t be - because most often subtle, as well as not so subtle, combinations of external and internal motivators work together to produce the best results. As far as college admissions is concerned, let’s face it, these days the prospect of “getting in” to a selective college is both an extrinsic motivator to make the grade and the ultimate reward for having made the grade. If we get lucky, like Rick, our kids will become the best and the brightest they can be and get intrinsically motivated along the way.

The following is from the article “Gold Star Junkies”:

"Of course, if systems of rewards and punishments are really as bad as some assert, they would have been swept from the classroom years ago. The fact that so many teachers deploy them points to some inherent value. Even many of the researchers critical of rewards are reluctant to condemn them unconditionally. Harvard’s Amabile, for one, is careful not to proscribe against all forms of extrinsic motivation, despite having spent the last two decades documenting its detrimental effects on creativity. “We have recently discovered,” she writes, that certain forms of extrinsic motivation “do not necessarily detract from intrinsic motivation and creativity. Rather these motivators…may actually increase creativity.”

Amabile offers several examples of valuable extrinsic motivation. Praise, for instance, can abet students’ efforts when it is given not as flattery but as information—"the confirmation of one’s achievement by respected others." She also discovered, interestingly enough, that low-skilled students are often more creative when their work is to be evaluated—a prospect that tended to undermine the performance of others. Some students, she hypothesizes, need incentives to embark upon a task in which they have little intrinsic interest.

Amabile also surmises that evaluation and rewards may in some cases facilitate what she terms “algorithmic” processes—that is, tasks requiring that a student follow specific rules and procedures. “Heuristic” processes, on the other hand, which involve creative, open-ended problem-solving, are often stifled by external motivators. A student may sit down and learn musical notation with the help of incentives, but no prospect of reward is likely to help her improvise a jazz solo on the keyboard.

In America, accepting the premise that extrinsic motivation doesn’t work is the equivalent of treason.

The experts and their research aside, teachers and parents—not to mention corporate executives and football coaches—aren’t likely to buy into the counterintuitive notion that extrinsic motivation doesn’t work. In America, accepting such a premise would be the equivalent of treason. After all, this is the land of opportunity, where the pursuit of happiness has always been roughly congruent with the quest to get rich. Horatio Alger’s “rags to riches” dime store novels, which Alger turned out by the dozen following the Civil War, are all about poor boys who, through a combination of pluck and luck, get rich. One of Alger’s most famous heroes, Mark the Match Boy, eschews a seductive life of crime in favor of honest hustle not only because it’s the right thing to do but also because he hopes it will get him off the street corner and into a mansion. Mark is a good boy but expediently good. He wants the big payoff—the reward."