Roland Fryer, a professor of Economics at Harvard was featured in this week's TIME Magazine in an article called "Should Kids be Bribed to Do Well in School?"
article here: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1978589,00.html
Two thoughts: one on formulation of policy, and another on the experiment itself
One)
i particularly like what Fryer has to say about formulating public policy. To paraphase, Fryer states that if we want to formulate policy, we should not implement policy based on a notion or crystal-ball the effects of any program we want to put into action. Effective policy should be based on facts, should be tested.
Fryer also goes on to talk about how information and methods should be part of a policy evaluation process. We shouldn't enact policies based on what we think is best because simply, what's best for you and me isn't best for everyone else. So let's get our hands dirty and get true facts, true understanding of what's driving behaviour and work with that. The scientific method, whilst not perfect, is aimed at trying to achieve this.
Two)
this is all speculative but I was thinking about schools in Singapore vs. schools in the US and why the same monetary scheme may not be necessary in singapore. My musing is that it could be a peer effect story.
Growing up, everything about the education system in Singapore was ranked. Your ranking in class, your class' ranking in the school, your school's ranking in the nation. There was a constant sense of competition amongst students that acted as self-reinforcing mechanism for kids to be prompted to study. In the US --possibly in some of the poorer districts -- this self-reinforcing mechanism may not exist. If such mechanisms do not exist, then offering financial incentives may be a very smart thing. After all, why would an 8 or 13 year old be self-motivated to undertake tasks that may mould and shape his future paths at that age? 21 seems like a long way off when you're in the single digits. so maybe financial incentives isn't a bad idea at all to get them started.
i keep coming back to the image of a kid who is forced to take piano lessons in his early years. He hates it at first, but later on in life, he grows to love the sound, the ability to come back to an instrument that he can guide with his own hands, to a tune that in that moment is all his own.
3 comments:
A couple of comments:
1) While I know nothing about the education system in S'pore, I point out that in North American schools the competition seems to be most evident in something like sports, on which an unnecessarily heavy emphasis is placed.
Besides, even if we wanted competition in North American schools, there are stereotypes that boys are dumb, that getting good grades is for losers, etc.
2) Competition was definitely part of what helped me succeed in school in North America, if only because I was friends with the only Chinese guy in town and I refused to let him beat me.
3) On the TIME article specifically, there's no great mystery there: the Texas program worked best because it didn't reward the result, but the skills which GOT the result.
Jarrett, i think you raised a very interesting point about how competition is more emphasized in sporting fields in North America. If neighbourhood and peer effects are at work then, observing that your peers succeed via athletic achievements suggest to one that this is where an individual should concentrate his efforts.
then it would seem that the financial rewards (and i emphasize the word reward as opposed to the magazine's use of the word "bribe" because the timing of the receipt of the financial incentive is totally different under the two terms) is filling a void that would otherwise prompt self-motivation towards studying etc.
finally, also entirely agree on your 3rd point. i think the neat part about the experiment however is that while the result may be unsurprising, testing such outcomes helps to substantiate a notion and can potentially guide better policy formulation and use of scarce resources. so i still appreciate the scientific method here for producing this unsurprising result :)
sorry, correction, not "a void that would otherwise prompt self-motivated studying". i don't mean to say that it is automatic. but my idea is that culture, environment, background and peer values help introduce self-reinforcing mechanisms.These mechanisms may be directed towards encouraging certain kinds of behaviour. In the absence of mechanisms that prompt self-motivated studying, incentive structures that promote habit formation and reward "input activities"as opposed to output seem appropriate.
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