When Edward Deci was in grade school, he remembered his teacher challenging the class: whoever read the most books, would get a wonderful prize. Little Eddie noticed that his teacher was only keeping track of how many books students checked out, so he checked out as many books as he could not reading half of them. At the end of the school year, he was declared the winner and got a big box of crayons.
When Deci became a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester, he followed up on his childhood experience. One group of teachers was told to get their students to read books by making reading interesting and exciting. Another group of teachers was told to give a coupon for pizza for every book a child read.
Sure enough, the pizza readers read more books at the beginning. But like Deci, they looked for the shortest, easiest books, reading as little as possible. When the coupons stopped, the students actually read less books than before. Students who were encouraged to read for the love of reading did read less at the beginning, but they kept on reading; they were hooked.
Experiments on external versus internal motivations have been done by various psychologists confirming the same results. When external rewards supplant internal rewards, only simple tasks have a positive impact, but complex tasks such as learning to read actually suffer. The more directly the external reward is connected to the action, the less effective it is on improving the complex task.
In 2007, Harvard economist, Roland Fryer, Jr. devised a plan to pay black students to learn. Most motivational psychologists told him it wasn’t going to work. So what happened?
First reports appeared to support that paying students had a positive outcome. But a careful reading of the results pretty much confirmed what Deci would have predicted. Paying students had a weak impact on reading and virtually no impact on math.
But wait! Students were paid to read books, two dollars for each book. These students read more books! And they probably had no more love of reading than in Deci’s experiments.
But wait! Students were paid for their attendance and that increased! And they did that when they were paid! Deci’s own work shows that pay-for-performance works on simple tasks like showing up, not on complex tasks such as learning. Did Fryer’s students learn more? Not really.
“To my surprise, incentive programs that rewarded process seemed to be more effective than those that rewarded outcomes,” said Fryer in the Washington Post article. Why would Fryer be so surprised?
In other words, paying students to show up to school might have a positive impact on getting them to school, but once they are there, it will take something more to get them to learn. Giving students short term rewards such as candy bars, pizza, or cash for learning just doesn’t work. Praise from a parent or a teacher is clearly an external reward, but such rewards usually do not supplant internal motivation.
Unfortunately, I still go into schools and see a fat pile of pizza coupons often sitting on a principal’s desk. They should read Edward Deci’s Why We Do What We Do. Then they should throw a big pizza party, but forget trying to use the coupons to increase learning.
