Students Are Mostly Individual, Pleasure-Seeking Calculators

Incentives matter—a lot.  In fact, incentives are the driving forces of all human actions and behaviors, by definition.  People would literally sit motionless and quiet if there weren’t compelling reasons to speak or to take action.  Newton’s First Law of Motion: An object at rest tends to remain at rest and an object in motion tends to remain in motion, unless acted on by another force.  That force, for humans, and for other animals, is the incentive.

Some incentives encourage people to perform certain behaviors.  When my body has gone without food for a period of time, a chemical reaction occurs in my stomach that tells my brain that I need victuals.  This uneasy feeling inside of me causes me to move from where I am to seek out steak or apples or Starbursts.  Other incentives (called disincentives) discourage me from certain behaviors.  When I drive down the highway, I follow the speed limit mostly because I fear that law enforcement will pull me over and charge me a fine, causing me to lose money that I would otherwise use to rent movies or buy beer.

All of this seems elementary, but, for as long as there have been schools, teachers have struggled with how to incentivize their students to learn (and follow certain rules).  How do you encourage students to read novels or complete worksheets on dividing fractions when they’d rather be outside playing soccer, writing love notes, or surfing YouTube?  After all, the latter give many—if not most—students more pleasure.

Roland Fryer, one of Harvard’s leading education economists, has been studying student incentives for a few years now.  He was one of the first scholars to propose paying students real dollars to excel academically.  (My grandmother beat him out by a few decades, though.)  For the 2007-2008 and 2008-2009 academic years, Dr. Fryer implemented several school-based randomized trials that paid students for things like good attendance, classroom behavior, test scores, and reading books.  Education Week reports that the experiments were conducted in over 250 urban classrooms in New York City, Chicago, Dallas, and DC, and that what students were rewarded for, how much, and how often varied by city.

Education Week also reports that the results were mixed:

A multicity experiment to test the effect of paying students for performance succeeded in increasing achievement when the payments were tied to specific behaviors related to learning, such as reading books, but not when the awards depended directly on test scores, new findings show.

Once I get my hands on Roland Fryer’s working paper, I’ll have some more in-depth analysis.  But for now, I want to make a few simple observations that I’ve picked up from teaching and incentivizing students (young and old) in my classrooms:

1. Not all students respond to incentives in the same way. Some students might be strongly incentivized by money, but others might weakly respond to it or not respond at all.  Students, as individuals, are incentivized by unique and peculiar sticks and carrots: promises of increased freedom, flattering compliments, peer pressure, threats of calling home.  Teachers should ask themselves what makes each of their students “tick.”  In other words: What does Student X care about, like, or dislike most?

2. Students are pleasure-seeking calculators. Whether they are fully conscious of it or not, students often make calculated, rational decisions when choosing how to behave and selecting which activities to engage in.  If the pleasure from playing Xbox into the wee hours of the morning is greater than the pain from the consequences of falling asleep in class and not completing homework assignments, students will choose the Xbox.  The goal, for just about all humans, is to maximize pleasure and minimize pain.

3. Students are more likely to respond to incentives when they are timely. When my grandmother paid me $20 for report cards with straight A’s, she provided me with a very weak incentive.  Report cards came out every six weeks and too much time passed between the literature test in week one and the prize money at the end of week six.  This is the same problem with paying students for abstract, long-term achievements like passing scores on standardized tests.  Teachers should instead provide rewards or punishments immediately after students achieve or do not achieve desired outcomes on clearly-defined, concrete goals.  When Tyrone finishes a novel and passes the corresponding comprehension test, he should receive his $5 immediately.  When Jane stands in line quietly, she should get her piece of bubble gum on-the-spot (if feasible).

The lesson here is that the world would be a much more pleasurable place if people were more consciously aware of what really motivated them and others.  Why am I taking this action? Why is she behaving that way? Both teachers and policymakers have to look beyond the surface and delve deep into the human ego to understand what drives students’ decisions.

Incentives are powerful forces for influencing human behavior.  It’s too bad that the incentives we have tried to construct in our schools are constantly losing out to other, less sociably-desirable incentives for many, many students.

Tagged as: Human Ego, Influencing Student Behavior, Paying Students, Roland Fryer, Student Incentives, Timely Rewards and Punishments