No Bribe Left Behind: Putting Newt's Zaniest Education Policy To The Test | The New Rep... - 0 views
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exposure alone does very little to increase the vocabulary and background knowledge necessary to achieve true fluency
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extrinsic cash incentives create temporary motives. “You do the work, you get paid. … Then the money stops. Do you still keep going to work?
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In 1999, Deci analyzed 128 studies on incentives that overwhelmingly supported his point that providing extrinsic incentives to perform certain tasks decreased whatever intrinsic appeal they had
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as children get older, between third and eighth grade, their intrinsic motivation to study decreases considerably. The more they’re in school, the less they enjoy it.
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A recent, large-scale study by Harvard economist Roland Fryer, a 2011 MacArthur grant recipient, has yielded some promising results on this front. In the fall of 2007, Fryer set up cash incentive programs in Chicago, Dallas, D.C., and New York. The twelve million dollar, 38,000-student study (half of it funded by Fryer’s organization, EdLabs; half by the school districts) was the largest ever conducted on the effects of incentives on academic achievement in the US. The results were released last May
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Paying second-graders to read about six books per year (again, two dollars per book) Fryer found that standardized test scores in reading among students comfortable with English increased at a rate that would typically suggest three extra months of schooling
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Intrinsic motivation, Fryer was surprised to find, was not affected significantly, and one year after the study's conclusion, 60 percent of the gains made by the sample group had been retained. Incentivized reading, it seemed, worked for certain students. Observing such sustained increases in reading proficiency led Fryer to his most important finding: effort, or “inputs,” could be incentivized, while improved scores, or “outputs,” could not. (Another study conducted by Fryer, released as a working paper last month, found that a combination of similar “input” incentives—involving parents, teachers, and students—yielded even more impressive results.)