The Relationship Between Reward And Performance

Thanks once again to a friend on Twitter, I just finished reading this Time article about a study done on the effects of "bribing" students to do well in school. It's a terrific write-up that should be read by anyone at all interested in this topic (which should include, I would think, most any parent).

I mention the concept of rewarding your child for scholastic performance in a few different places in the pages of No Kid of Ours is Failing at Math (How Parents Can Help). Right off the bat, in Chapter 1, I lay out a scenario where a parent might motivate a kid to raise her Math mark by promising "that jacket that you said you wanted" if a certain target was reached (85% on the next test, in this case). Then, in Chapter 9, while describing the importance of what I call "Golden Rule of Helping # 1: Keep It Positive", I provide a variety of suggestions for what form rewards might take, with cold hard cash only being one of them (others include privileges around the house, increased activity time, fun trips, and so on). The goals in all cases are to motivate the desired type of behaviour, reward it if it's achieved, help the child in achieving it, and build up a positive association for the behaviour in the child's mind.

Reading over the Time article, I could see a fairly similar approach there. However, the researcher draws an important distinction between goals that the student has control over, and ones that he or she doesn't. As a Math tutor and someone who'd like to see more parents get more involved with their children's Math development, I interpret that as meaning that parents can't just drop this problem into their kids' laps along with the promise of a paycheque. In other words, you can't just provide motivation; you also have to give them all of the support they could ever need in order to reach those set goals. There's a hypothetical example in the Time piece of providing a million dollars to someone if they can "solve a third-order linear partial differential equation." The punch line by the article writer is that he couldn't do it, even for that much money. But the appropriate question to ask is, "Could you solve it for a million dollars if I spent the next several weeks or months patiently teaching you how to do Calculus?" That's more what I hope parents will do, especially at the lower grades where the material is likely to be well within their capability to understand and explain.

I love the fact that experiments of that sort are happening on a fairly large scale, out there in the real world. I also hope that parents are trying similar types of approaches out in the home, and using whatever works to help their children succeed at school (and ultimately, at life).