Student incentives seem to boost reading scores, according to a newly released piece of research. Critics have described plans to give cash, electronic gear or other rewards as bribery, but the study of charter school incentive programs from Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes finds “reward systems are found to have stable and consistent positive impacts for student learning in reading. The effect holds across grades and across network and non-network charter schools.”
“It’s not a silver bullet, but for very little investment, you seem to get a pretty consistent bump,” Margaret E. Raymond, the study’s author, said in an interview with Education Week.
Read a summary of the findings here. The full report, “Paying for A’s” is here.
The success of incentives will get all the ink, but this finding caught my eye: “Schools in which there is continuous or near-continuous assessment of student conduct produce larger gains in reading than schools that have reward systems.”
Rewards for good grades and test scores are gaining traction. Forget stickers and pizza parties. Eddy Ramirez’ piece in this week’s U.S. News notes that the the bribes…sorry, incentives, include basketball tickets, iPods, cars and cash. Ramirez quotes Roland Fryer, a Harvard professor of economics, who says it’s “‘absurd’ to expect children who grew up in poverty, with parents who dropped out of school, to appreciate the value of education without giving them immediate rewards for taking school seriously.”
Maybe so, but if it’s for the kids’ benefit, not to boost test scores, then where were all those incentives before testing mania hit fever pitch? Just wondering.
Over at her spiffy new digs on the Education Week site, the redoubtable Eduwonkette does what she always does better than anyone: looks at the research. It’s always refreshing to read education research from outside the education department, and EW digests three reports from last weekend’s American Economic Association meeting, all of which looked at student financial incentives. Do incentives work? The economists say “not really.”
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