Nothing Except Typo

Does Extrinsic Reward Work? Again No

The results of the experiments where scholastic performance was rewarded were uniformly disappointing. ... Plenty of money was paid out, but Mr Fryer found absolutely no evidence that paying students led them to do better than their peers in the control schools. ...

What explains this disappointing result? Some argue that the external push provided by money erodes an inherent love of learning. But participating students also took tests that measured how much they enjoyed studying. There was no indication that the payments affected those sentiments. Nor was it the case that students were uninterested in the programme.

I am interested in the real meaning of the "tests". Students get paid due to excellent performance on exams, which should be the results of hard studying. So it's well expected they will enjoy studying, no matter whether they really love studying itself or the delicious rewards. Researchers will find difficulties, actually, to explain if students dislike it just because of the extra pocket money.

The designed purpose of the tests, aka proving that money doesn't erode the inherent love of learning, cannot be easily achieved in the short term. The effect of money rewards seems to be more destructive in the long run. We say money is evil because it replaces the long-term love of the activity itself with the short-term love of pure results. The experiment has nothing to do with the intrinsic love.

The key point of this story is based on the argument that extrinsic reward does work when properly designed. See

... leaving it up to participants to find the best way to earn goodies will not work either if, as Mr Fryer believes, pupils have very little idea how to go about improving their own scores.

When students in New York or Chicago were asked how they would earn the rewards on offer, they came up with all sorts of ideas about test-taking strategies, but not one mentioned reading the textbooks or doing practice questions. On the other hand, those whose performance improved in the Israeli experiment had clear ideas about how to go about making sure they graduated. They took more practice tests and were much more likely to attend free coaching sessions.

If students do not know how to improve their own performance, the best strategy may be to pick a simple task, reward pupils for doing it, and hope that this translates into higher grades. This was the approach Mr Fryer took in Dallas, where second-grade students were simply given $2 for every book they read if they passed a computerised comprehension test on it. Predictably this spurred them to read more books and improved their vocabularies. But it also improved their school grades substantially, although this is not what they were paid for. A year after the payments had stopped, students in the schools that had offered money were still outperforming those in control schools, although the gap had narrowed. It may have helped that the Dallas students were younger. Middle-school students in Washington, DC, gained little from being paid for inputs like attendance. But the results from Dallas suggest that payments can help at least some students get more out of school.

If the students never read ever, a little cash can gently remind them of the importance of reading.

So does the reward really work? Students are paid to read books now. Will they lose interests in reading after the payments ceased? They outperform others because they read more; the advantage cannot lose in days or months. So even they stop reading immediately, they can stay among the top for a while.

So money can do no more than a reminder like post-it notes. Once you are rather accustomed to this system, the absence of the reminder will throw you into the dis-organized again.

Reference: * “The Effects of High Stakes High School Achievement Awards”, by Joshua Angrist and Victor Lavy. Forthcoming in the American Economic Review. “Financial Incentives and Student Achievement”, by Roland G. Fryer junior. NBER Working Paper 15898, April 2010.