I'm all for more experiments in this area, since we need them to combat our bad intuitions and simple conjectures, and as others have noted we especially need to find out what happens to these kids when you take away the rewards. Considering that atheists don't fall into extreme immorality after rejecting their religion, I'm willing to bet that most of the kids wouldn't just fall back into old patterns or become worse off than before, even though this doesn't make me intuitively comfortable... Again, we need experiments.
There's also some slight bitterness I feel that others around here might share. We're smart and we made it through the system without these nice monetary rewards. $95 a week? For not dressing like crap and not talking back and doing some trivial homework? $95 is a lot of money, I never got that, and when I worked 20 hour weeks at a grocery store one year my weekly paychecks were roughly $120. People should just be motivated to learn on their own without these rewards, and the whole grading system in general helps to undermine this...
As TamDenholm noted, the fact that we need to use such motivations for something as important as learning is more a symptom than solution of an underlying problem with the education system. The point in the article about how they desire to foster intrinsic motivation with extrinsic rewards made me do a double take. Yet the solution still isn't "let the students do what they want", because most will do the minimum, and then schools will cut budgets and staff, and with only "generalist" teachers you get generally shallow teachers across all subjects. I'll agree that some teachers can teach more subjects than one and many classes can benefit from a mixture that only a special generalist could adequately teach (it always bugs me when math teachers admit their ignorance on the uses of complex numbers), but we really need specialists. The college model is correct here.
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tldr: More experiments, please!
I'm all for more experiments in this area, since we need them to combat our bad intuitions and simple conjectures, and as others have noted we especially need to find out what happens to these kids when you take away the rewards. Considering that atheists don't fall into extreme immorality after rejecting their religion, I'm willing to bet that most of the kids wouldn't just fall back into old patterns or become worse off than before, even though this doesn't make me intuitively comfortable... Again, we need experiments.
There's also some slight bitterness I feel that others around here might share. We're smart and we made it through the system without these nice monetary rewards. $95 a week? For not dressing like crap and not talking back and doing some trivial homework? $95 is a lot of money, I never got that, and when I worked 20 hour weeks at a grocery store one year my weekly paychecks were roughly $120. People should just be motivated to learn on their own without these rewards, and the whole grading system in general helps to undermine this...
As TamDenholm noted, the fact that we need to use such motivations for something as important as learning is more a symptom than solution of an underlying problem with the education system. The point in the article about how they desire to foster intrinsic motivation with extrinsic rewards made me do a double take. Yet the solution still isn't "let the students do what they want", because most will do the minimum, and then schools will cut budgets and staff, and with only "generalist" teachers you get generally shallow teachers across all subjects. I'll agree that some teachers can teach more subjects than one and many classes can benefit from a mixture that only a special generalist could adequately teach (it always bugs me when math teachers admit their ignorance on the uses of complex numbers), but we really need specialists. The college model is correct here.