With all the talks we've been having recently about the effects of stress and parenting styles on students, I thought I'd summarize a story recently covered by NPR titled "How Do You Motivate Kids To Stop Skipping School?
The article discusses how a recent study demonstrated that oftentimes, providing incentives to attend school is counterproductive. The study looked at 799 boys and girls in an impoverished part of India who were part of an altruistic program that, despite providing a significantly higher quality education than other programs, finds itself with the same attendance rate.
The program tried to provide an incentive - those who showed up 32 out of 38 days would receive two pencils and an eraser. Initially, attendance rates improved. However, as time went on and the reward period was concluded, attendance rates went back to normal. With kids who didn't qualify for the reward, the attendance level actually decreased to a point lower than where it was before incentives were introduced.
The summary NPR provided concluded that failing these types of challenges are disheartening. What do you think?
I believe that there should be a reward for just being there instead of having to show up all 32 out of 38 days. This would motivate students to show up more often even if they do not come all 32 days, the attendance rate still goes up.
ReplyDeleteI think it's really fascinating that the attendance actually began to drop for the students with lower attendance rates... Maybe it's related to that article we read about tiger moms? It mentioned that a possible explanation for the academic achievement of Asian children has to do with their belief that working hard leads to success, while many others believe that success is determined simply by intelligence and thus give up if they fail at something. Maybe the students who didn't receive the prizes gave up, since they didn't think it would be possible to improve.
ReplyDeleteI think it's really fascinating that the attendance actually began to drop for the students with lower attendance rates... Maybe it's related to that article we read about tiger moms? It mentioned that a possible explanation for the academic achievement of Asian children has to do with their belief that working hard leads to success, while many others believe that success is determined simply by intelligence and thus give up if they fail at something. Maybe the students who didn't receive the prizes gave up, since they didn't think it would be possible to improve.
ReplyDeleteThe root behind most ditching is that learning can be tedious and boring for many students. This is because everyone has a different learning style: visual, physical, musical, etc. Instead of working on creating incentives to force students to want to learn why not work towards changing how we teach.
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