EDUCATION WEEK
April 19, 1995
"A Lot of Fat Kids Who
Don’t Like to Read":
[Originally published as “Newt Gingrich’s Reading Plan”]
By Alfie Kohn
By Alfie Kohn
Our culture is marinated in behaviorism. At
work, at school, and at home, we take for granted that the way to get things
done is to dangle goodies in front of people. Thus, it seemed perfectly
reasonable to observers across the political spectrum when Speaker of the
House Newt Gingrich in February inaugurated a national campaign to pay
children to read. The program, devised some time ago at West Georgia College,
offers students $2 for each book they finish.
Politicians can be forgiven, perhaps, for a
simple-minded faith in behavioral manipulation. But educators ought to know
by now, in light of research and experience, that rewards are not merely
ineffective over the long haul but actually counter-productive.
One study after another has demonstrated
that the more someone is rewarded for doing something (or for doing it well),
the less interest that person is likely to have in whatever he or she was
rewarded for doing. Consider:
*
Children who are frequently rewarded by their parents are somewhat
less generous than their peers. (They've learned that the only reason to
help is that they will get something for doing so.)
*
Students who are led to think about grades tend to be less interested
in learning, less likely to think creatively, and less likely to choose
difficult assignments than those who are encouraged to focus on the task
itself. (The point is to do only what is necessary to snag an A, a mindset
that is, as one researcher put it, the “enemy of exploration.” Small wonder
that students come to ask: “Do we have to know this? Is this going to be on
the test?”)
*
When children are offered tangible or verbal rewards for drinking an
unfamiliar beverage, they are less apt to like that beverage later than are
children who were never rewarded for drinking it in the first place. (They
may have reasoned, “If this lady has to bribe me to try this, it must be
something I won't like”-- a thought process hardly limited to beverages.)
Consider the depressingly pervasive program
called “Book It!” -- Pizza Hut's edible precursor to Mr. Gingrich's plan.
Since doggie biscuits can train the family pet, it was naturally assumed that
pepperoni could get kids to open more books. And indeed, in some cases it
does just that. After all, rewards, like punishments, often succeed in buying
temporary compliance.
But what is the effect on these students'
choice of reading (hint: look for a run on short books with large type),
their comprehension of what they've read, and above all, their attitude
toward reading when the program is over? The late educational psychologist
John Nicholls speculated several years ago that the likely result of this
program would be "a lot of fat kids who don't like to read."
Part of the problem is that many of us
assume there exists a single entity called “motivation,” such that students
can have more or less of it. We want them to have more, so we offer stickers
and stars, A's and praise, candy and cash. But what educational and social
psychologists have learned is that there are qualitatively different kinds of
motivation, and more of one kind often means less of another. Extrinsic
motivators (inducements outside the task) are not only inferior to intrinsic
motivation (an interest in the task itself): They actually tend to undermine
such interest.
Thus, the question we need to ask is not
“How motivated is this student?” but “How is this student motivated?” What
matters is not the amount but the type of motivation involved--whether a
child, for example, is encouraged to see reading as something gratifying in
its own right ... or as a tedious prerequisite to getting a reward.
The fact that interest in learning is
typically undermined by offering rewards is not only a disturbing discovery
in itself, but also a powerful explanation for another well-replicated
finding: Rewards usually reduce the quality of performance, particularly on
challenging tasks. A quarter of a century ago, Prof. Janet Spence, later to
become the president of the American Psychological Association, wrote that
rewards “have effects that interfere with performance in ways that we are
only beginning to understand.”
Of course, there is nothing wrong with
pizza or money, per se. The problem comes when we offer such things
contingently, and they become devices to manipulate behavior. Edward Deci and Richard Ryan at the University of Rochester have
pointedly referred to the use of rewards as “control through seduction.”
The most destructive arrangement of all,
then, is to pile one reward on another--for example, by promising money or
goodies to students who get good grades. A Minneapolis-based program called
“Renaissance” (which might more accurately be termed “Dark Ages”) does
exactly this. Not content merely to encourage students to see the point of
school as collecting good grades, this program sets up a kind of caste system
in which students are issued color-coded I.D. cards corresponding to their
grade-point average that entitle them to differential discounts from local
merchants. If some foundation perversely commissioned me to develop a program
whose aim was to utterly destroy children's interest in learning, I honestly
don't think I could top this one.
Likewise, if a school institutes a “good
citizenship” program, in which the aim is to “catch children doing something
right” and offer them rewards for their good behavior, we can practically
watch children's empathy evaporate before our eyes. Again, it isn't just that
trying to control behavior fails to develop any commitment to that behavior;
it's that rewards actively displace the motives and values that matter.
Instead of helping children to ask, “What kind of person do I want to be?” or
“What kind of community do we want to have?” a child in such a school is led
to ask, “What do they want me to do, and what do I get for doing it?”
Here are three objections commonly offered
to this sort of criticism:
1. “Why not use rewards at first to lure
students into reading or helping, and then fade them out later?”
Unfortunately, this bait-and-switch approach is naive in overlooking the
fundamental difference in motives between what is created by rewards and what
we ultimately want. The introduction of an extrinsic motivator immediately
changes the whole Gestalt -- the way a child looks at herself, the way she
looks at the person offering the reward, and the way she looks at the task.
2. “What if students aren't intrinsically
motivated to do what we're asking?” The trouble may be more with what we're
asking than with their lack of interest. If children are required to multiply
rows of naked numbers, memorize a bunch of facts, or slog through sodden
textbooks--things that few members of our species would find
interesting--then it is no wonder adults resort to offering bribes (and
threats). But the challenge is to come up with engaging tasks, and to bring
students into the process of making decisions about their learning, rather
than coercing them into compliance. Kids' natural capacity to help others,
meanwhile, is best tapped by explaining, modeling, and transforming schools
into caring communities.
3. “Adults are paid for working; why not
pay children for learning?” To begin with, this rather desperate
rationalization ignores the crucial difference between pay and
pay-for-performance plans at work. Getting employees to see compensation as a
reward (through bonuses and such) is notably counterproductive if the
objective is quality rather than quantity, if the task requires any degree of
creativity, and if the time frame extends beyond what happens today.
Second, and more important, nothing in
school is really analogous to money, which adults must earn one way or the
other. Here, our concern is with helping students not only to read but to
want to read, to become lifelong learners and decent people. Even if
incentives were effective with employees, this would offer no justification
whatsoever for using them to reach a different set of goals with a
developmentally different group of people.
We need to work with children to tap their
natural desire to make sense of the world and to play with words and numbers
and ideas. Rewards, however well-intentioned, are basically ways of doing
things to someone. Educators need to help politicians understand that in the
long run, carrots and sticks are bound to backfire.
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Alfie Kohn is the author of several books on human behavior and education, including Punished by Rewards: The Trouble With Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes (Houghton Mifflin), which contains the citations for the research described here.
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Copyright © 1995 by Alfie Kohn. This article may be downloaded, reproduced, and distributed without permission as long as each copy includes this notice along with citation information (i.e., name of the periodical in which it originally appeared, date of publication, and author's name). Permission must be obtained in order to reprint this article in a published work or in order to offer it for sale in any form. Please contact: permissions@alfiekohn.org.