Rewarding students for high performance has been discussed here and elsewhere, now a pending California bill would authorize and encourage school districts to provide nonmonetary incentives to middle and high school students.
“What we’re really looking at is recognition and motivation and incentive to achieve,” Sen. Elaine Alquist, a Santa Clara Democrat who proposed the measure, tells the Sacramento Bee. Not everyone agrees. “At some point, students need to be taught that every good deed does not require reward,” said Jon Coupal of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association.
I’m a pragmatist. I favor whatever works. But there will always be something that rubs me the wrong way about having to reward people for acting in their own self-interest.
Update: The Gradebook, a really good edublog by the St. Petersburg Times’ Jeffrey Solochek, has more on this, including similar proposals in Florida and New York.
“But there will always be something that rubs me the wrong way about having to reward people for acting in their own self-interest.”
In California, the tests DO NOT COUNT to the test-takers (STUDENTS)! They cannot be factored into grades! Starting in fourth grade, some students figure it out, by eighth only saps try hard. Get real, do you complete all of the surveys sent to you? Do you really expect intelligent people to try hard for two days on something that doesn’t matter to them. It’s all foolishness bordering on insanity. I laugh about. My job is based on how many young adults cna I convince NOT to simply bubble in answers. Yes indeed, education is a wonderful thing for policy makers. You!
Would that I were a policy maker! I’m a teacher, albeit a lapsed one.
I’ve written extensively elsewhere about how testing narrows curriculum, so I won’t repeat myself here. My comment in no way should be interpreted as a defense of testing. It’s all about intrinsic motivation, in my opinion. We want our children to do their best, regardless of the task — their homework, a test, a pickup basketball game. I find the idea that a well-prepared intrinsically-motivated kid would not try hard on a test because they “don’t count” curious. Wait, you’re saying they’re not intrinsically motivated?
Aye, there’s the rub.
Oh please! Get real. Do you think 100% of the people you know will work at something that doesn’t matter for free for two days. 100%. Even to discuss this borders on insanity.
One wonders, of course, where kids get the idea that it doesn’t matter.
Yes, the school is considered better if students score well, but do 100% of students really care. Look at it this way, if “we” said, that voting matters and that 95% of all sub-groups of the USA must vote to make it matter as a sign of patriotism or goodness or duty or whatever, would they? They never have. And voting is pretty painless.
Get rid of the dreamy: “they should care or we should teach so that they should care.” There is no logical reason why they should at even a 50% level, let alone 100%. Our calls for students to do so is a sign of our stupidity. What is really amazing is how many try.
I’m not trying to be insulting. I play the game also, but laugh about playing a losing game.
I’m always surprised that schools don’t do more with the “school spirit” instinct as motivation. Many kids seem to care a lot about how their school ranks in football — why not test scores?
What about a parade an a newspaper spread for the school that has the best test score improvement in the area?
Because, while learning is in a students self-interest, showing up to bubble-in multiple choice questions that don’t count in your grade isn’t obviously rewarding. I remember at about hour 5 of the GREs feeling so bored that I’m sure it affected my score — and that was on a test that counted for a lot.
I don’t think my problem here is with rewarding kids for doing what’s in their self-interest, I think it’s with giving kids the idea they should be rewarded for anything they do that’s not in there immediate self-interest. But in a way, this method of evaluating schools has given students a significant amount of power, and grown-ups are now floundering trying to figure out how to deal with that.