Should We Pay Students to Learn?
I was talking with a group of educators the other day and they were explaining how pay-for-performance (P4P) programs are becoming popular in their field. The idea is that we give students money, prizes or tokens to engage in and perform well in the learning process.
As a cognitive designer this caught my attention – How do extrinsic rewards support or enhance the cognition of learning?
There is literature on the issue but it is mixed. A recent article in the New York Times, Rewards for Students Under A Microscope, offers a brief review and confirms what I heard – the question stirs a lot of emotion and programs that pay for performance are growing at a rapid rate. According to the article,
“Reward programs that pay students are under way in many cities. In some places, students can bring home hundreds of dollars for, say, taking an Advanced Placement course and scoring well on the exam.”
And some are showing some interesting results.
But others are failing….
and unfortunately,
“More than 100 academic studies have explored how and when rewards work on people of all ages, and researchers have offered competing analyses of what the studies, taken together, really mean.”
When science does not provide a clear answer, the methods of cognitive design – deconstructing related artifacts (e.g. loyalty programs), psychographic profiling, rapid cognitive modeling and iterative prototyping can be a real help. I’d appreciate comments from readers on the designs of P4P learning programs they are aware of and how well they are geared for how we really learn.
