Editorial: Learning incentives a viable option

The statistic is familiar by now: The U.S. ranks 14th among world nations in percentage of young people with a college degree. No longer a leader, the country languishes just four points above the 38-percent average among G20 and Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries.

Worse still, the U.S. has one of the worst rates of cross-generational academic advancement, ranking third to last in children attaining higher degrees than their parents.

Amidst this climate, economist Steven D. Levitt, of “Freakonomics” fame, proposes a controversial solution of the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink variety: bribe kids to work harder.

Levitt claims to have produced research proving this to be a potentially feasible solution. His findings largely correlate with a much larger study by Harvard economist Roland Fryer Jr., who offered $6.3 million in incentive money to study the effects of reward in 2010.

The findings suggest that while there are many ways money incentives don’t work (the Fryer experiment dramatically failed in one of the target cities, New York), there are some specific methods that offer promise. Younger students, especially males, can be incentivized to work harder if presented with a potential reward in the very near term. Performance on tests increases remarkably even when the incentive is just a $3 plastic trophy.

If this method does work, there might be reason to begin cautiously trying it on a broader scale.

Of course, in an ideal world, cash or prize incentives would be unnecessary. Students would all be prepared to thrive, inspired by a love of learning.

But given that some students — those with low parental involvement, for example — typically exhibit lower motivation and that motivation is one of many factors predicting success, applying these types of motivational techniques could be one of many tools that would improve academic outcomes for children who are not already environmentally disposed to learn. In the absence of feasible alternatives, it might be one of the best.

It might seem like an unappealing solution. It might seem like it cheapens learning.

And it might. Turning learning into a rudimentary pain-reward paradigm screams of turning knowledge into a cheap commodity. It feels like the value of a good spelling test is reduced to a $3 trinket.

This is one of several reasons such programs shouldn’t be attempted on high school students. Research shows effective motivation at this level and above must be intrinsic, not extrinsic. Otherwise, students figure out how to game the system, stop feeling motivated to learn for any higher purpose and instead, feel cheapened.

And if bribing students is treated as a magic wand solution, poor results should be expected. As economist John List of the University of Chicago noted in Time, students have to have some knowledge base before teachers can start thinking about rewards. After all, if you ask a random person to solve a third-order linear partial differential equation, you could bribe that person $1 million to solve it and still come up empty. For young students, even basic reading can represent a similar level of difficulty.

Still, with today’s situation so bleak, incentivising learning at the elementary level could offer a worthwhile attempt at a partial solution, provided that the dangers of such a strategy are always kept in mind.