Carrots and Sticks

Does offering incentives improve student performance?

Daniel Pink addresses the question of whether or not rewards improve performance in his book Drive.  

A wonderful, animated summary of some of the main points in his book can be found here:
 

Basically, Pink argues that the science indicates that if a task is purely algorithmic or mechanical, then "carrots" or "if-then" rewards work just fine. But when the task is more complicated, or when the task requires even minimal amounts of creative thinking, not only does a reward (big or small) not improve performance, but rewards can actually severely decrease performance, even when the rewards are quite large. This is true whether or not the reward is large or small.

He gives an example of scientists going to Madurai, India and offering rewards for performance on a variety of games.  Three levels of rewards offered, with one group offered two weeks pay for excellent performance. Surprisingly, the people offered the highest rewards performed the most poorly in eight of the nine tasks.

Pink hypothesizes that offering rewards can shift the focus from the task at hand to the reward, thus having the unintended consequence of dulling creative or critical thinking, leading to poorer rather than better performance.

Pink argues that instead of offering "if-then" rewards (which sometimes, but not always includes "extra credit" in college classrooms), we ought to start people less like horses performing work, and more like humans.  And humans, science indicates, are motivates by Autonomy, Mastery, and Self-Purpose.

He proposes a question that I think we should ask ourselves as teachers, "Do you want compliance or engagement?"

My next entry will cover in more detail Pink's ideas on Autonomy, Mastery, and Self-Purpose as it relates to the undergraduate classroom.