Paying students for attendance, behavior and homework can boost achievement
By Harvard economics professor Roland Fryer. Another good example of how incentives matter. Excerpts:
"Parents go to work even when they don’t feel like it because they get paid. Students will show up on time, do their homework, and pay attention in class, even if they’d rather be playing videogames, for the same reason.
In the late 2000s, I tested this concept in a series of randomized experiments in Chicago, Dallas, Houston, New York and Washington, D.C. In total, my research team distributed $15 million to approximately 36,000 students across roughly 290 schools. We found that carefully designed incentives can get kids to work harder and progress faster.
The trick isn’t to pay for a final outcome, such as a grade or a test score. What worked was to incentivize the key inputs—the behaviors and habits that create good outcomes down the line. Paying students to read books (and pass easy tests to verify the reading took place) substantially boosted reading comprehension. Rewarding mastery of math objectives was even more successful. Paying students based on their attendance, good behavior and homework completion boosted achievement more generally."
"students’ achievement remained elevated even after our incentives were removed. There is no evidence that we negatively affected students’ love of learning, but there is good evidence we may have increased their economic mobility.
It didn’t take a ton of money to make a real difference. Rewards were given out in $2 increments for each input—each book read, class attended, homework assignment completed. But the more you pay, the more effort you get. When we randomly increased incentives in Houston from $2 to $6—a threefold increase—student effort increased nearly threefold too."
"The return on investment is larger than most any other education reform that has been rigorously evaluated"
No comments:
Post a Comment