Gold Stars and Grades

What if deadlines, imposed goals, surveillance and evaluations were found to all undermine intrinsic motivation?

What if grades, gold stars, and other rewards for performance sabotage a student's desire to engage in learning for its own sake?

Are you prepared to engage with these questions or are they too threatening?

If you are willing to see cognitive dissonance as an opportunity to play with, rather than a crisis to be avoided, I suggest you try playing the game You say you want this, so then why are you doing that? by taking a look at these three books:

Why We Do What We Do by Edward Deci

Punished by Rewards by Alfie Kohn

Drive by Dan Pink

Standardization vs Autonomy

‘How motivated are you?” I hear this question all the time, and it makes me squirm. This question implies that motivation comes in only one flavor—and people either have lots or little of it. This is but one example of the massive disconnect between what education does and what science knows.

There are actually two kinds of motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic. But that isn’t even the catch; the catch is that these two kinds of motivation are inversely related – meaning that if one grows the other is likely to diminish.

Alfie Kohn unloads a mountain of research in his book Punished by Rewards illustrating that when people are told “do this and you’ll get that”, they tend to lose interest in the ‘this’ and gravitate towards the ‘that’. Kohn uses an old joke to capture this phenomenon:

"It is the story of an elderly man who endured the insults of a crowd of ten-year-olds each day as they passed his house on their way home from school. One afternoon, after listening to another round of jeers about how stupid and ugly and bald he was, the man came up with a plan. He met the children on his lawn the following Monday and announced that anyone who came back the next day and yelled rude comments about him would recieve a dollar. Amazed and excited, they showed up even earlier on Tuesday, hollering epithets for all they were worth. True to his word, the old man ambled out and paid everyone. "Do the same tomorrow," he told them, "and you'll get twenty-five cents for your trouble." The kids thought that was still pretty good and turned out again on Wednesday to taunt him. At the first catcall, he walked over with a roll of quarters and again paid off his hecklers. "From now on, he announced, "I can give you only a penny for doing this." The kids looked at each other in disbelief. "A penny?" they repeated scornfully. "Forget it!" And they never came back again."

The old man was able to sap the boys' intrinsic motivation for heckling with an extrinsic bribe. What's sad is that this is exactly what good-intentioned teachers do everyday when they use grades to artificially entice students to learn. Whether we know it or not - we are sapping students of their love for learning.
We are in an assessment paradox. Teachers are being encouraged to teach using differentiated instruction; however, at the same time, they are being torn in the opposite direction with top-down, authoritarian demands for high-stakes standardized test scores.

The true paradox lies in the reality that standardization and differentiation strive to achieve two very different goals. Standardization encourages management while differentations respects autonomy.

If we have to manage standardization, let's take a closer look at the term management. Dan Pink explains the folly of management in his book Drive:

We forget sometimes that "management" does not emanate from nature. It's not like a tree or a river. It's like a television or a bicycle. It's something that humans invented. As the strategy guru Gary Hamel has observed, management is a technology. And like Motivation 2.0, it's a technology that has grown creaky. While some companies have oiled the gears a bit, and plenty more have paid lip service to the same, at its core management hasn't changed much in a hundred years. Its central ethic remains control; it's chief tools remain extrinsic motivators. That leaves it largely out of sync with the non-routine, right-brain abilities on which many of the world's economics now depend. But could its most glairing weakness run deeper? Is management, as it's currently constituted, out of sync with human nature itself?

For everything Dan Pink suggests is wrong with managment, I suggest the same could be said of standardization. In fact, I would suggest you try and read the above excerpt again, but this time substitute the word management with standardization.
So if we are not wise to pursue managing standardization, what is the alternative? Richard Ryan and Edward Deci, the two architects of The Self-Determination Theory (SDT), have accumulated decades of research to support the idea that autonomy is at the heart of being human. Ryan and Deci explain:

Autonomous motivation involves behaving with a full sense of volition and choice whereas controlled motivation involves behaving with the experience of pressure and demand toward specific outcomes that comes from forces perceived to be external to the self.

Because standardization is not natural, it has to be maintained by a managed set of extrinsic manipulators that can only ever be experienced as controlling. Just as management, standardization is out of sync with human nature. A far better model of learning would see us subscribe to both differentiated instruction and differentiated assessment.

All this means that we need to make a choice; we can no longer afford to ignore what science knows. We have got to decide which kind of motivation aligns itself with our ultimate objectives.

It’s time we purged our teaching tool kits of our carrots and sticks and created an extrinsic-free, autonomous learning environment that will provide our children an opportunity to authentically grow their natural, intrinsic love for learning.

The day we can authentically say that our children experience their successes and failures not as reward and punishment but as information will be a day that we can say we actually achieved something.

I wrote this for Synthesizing Education.

Intrinsic Motivation and Autonomy

Teachers and parents complain regularly that their students or children show a lack of initiative. They aren't self-starters and seem to need more and more kicks-in-the-ass to get motivated. What we may not realize, is that we may to blame.

More and more research has come about to show that human beings are autonomous creatures.

We all, to some extent, want to be kings of our own castles.

Dan Pink writes in his book Drive about how autonomy in the work place has helped companies like Google to give their employees the autonomy they need in order to be uber-productive.

In a typical year, more than half of Google's new offerings are birthed during this period of autonomy. For example, scientist Krishna Bharat, frustrated by how difficult it was to find news stories online, created Google News in his 20 percent time. The site now recieves millions of visitors every day. Former Google engineer Paul Bucheit created Gmail, now one of the world's most popular e-mail programs, as his 20 percent project. Many other Google products share similar creation stories - among them Orkut (Google's social networking software), Google Talk (it's instant message application), Google Sky (which allows astronomically inclined users to browse pictures of the universe), and Google Translate ( its translation software for mobile devices). As Google engineer Alec Proudfoot, whose own 20 percent project aimed at boosting the efficiency of hybrid cars, put it in a television interview: "Just about all the good ideas here at Google have bubbled up from 20 percent time.

What Dan Pink shares with us is that providing autonomy for employees is not only something we must do, but it is something we should do. We should not only because the employee benefits, but because ultimately everyone benefits.

As a classroom teacher, I have decided to provide more and more autonomous time for my students to learn things of their choice. This doesn't mean I give them a blank cheque and wash my hands of them. Rather, I am still their teacher offering the guidance they need, while still actively engaging in their learning.

In an article entitled Freedom helps kids learn more, Richard Ryan and Edward Deci offer this indictment of control and testing:

Too much control over a child's learning - and this includes excessive testing - is bad, a pair of visiting researchers have said.



An emphasis on exams puts stress on the child, and also on the teacher - whose performance hangs on how well his students do.

Deci and Ryan go on to explain Cognitive Evaluation Theory:

Cognitive Evaluation Theory further specifies, and studies have shown, that feelings of competence will not enhance intrinsic motivation unless accompanied by a sense of autonomy or, in attributional terms, by an internal perceived locus of causality. Thus, according to CET, people must not only experience competence or efficacy, they must also experience their behavior as self-determined for intrinsic motivation to be in evidence.

Providing choice and autonomy is a human need, and to overly limit or control this in a way that provides children with less than they need is detrimental to their learning. Alfie Kohn writes about choice and autonomy in the classroom in his book Punished by Rewards:

The rational for giving children choice is threefold. First, it is intrinsically desirable because it is a more respectful way of dealing with others. Second, it offers benefits for teachers. their job becomes a good deal more interesting when it involves collaborating with students to decide what is going to happen.

One of the best ways to motivate students is to realize that we can't. We can extrinsically motivate them, but that would only work against some of the very research that shows students require more autonomy and choice rather than control and manipulation.

The best we can do is provide children with an extrinsic-free learning environment where we can work with them to become the mature, logical, creative, free-thinkers we would want them to become.

The Case Against Rewards

I had the opportunity to speak at Red Deer College where I gave the case against the use of rewards. I also had the opportunity to sit in and listen to the presenter who provided the case for rewards.

After receiving permission from the speaker to sit in, I knew that I would have to sit quietly and say nothing.

To say that my ears were bleeding by the time the hour was up would be a gross understatement.

In order to reconcile with my bleeding ears, I have decided to provide a rebuttal here on my blog. I will use a Q & A format to provide my ideas.

Don't we all work for pay? How many adults would continue with their jobs if they didn't get paid?

Yes, we do work for pay. I teach middle school and I get paid, and while it is true that I couldn't survive without that pay cheque, there is a big difference between someone who gets paid and someone who works only because they get paid. Many good people who love what they do, continue to do what they love even when financial rewards are removed.

The best employees, the best teachers, the best athletes, the best learners are those who do what they do because they love it. Sure, they might get paid for it, but it isn't nor should it be the driving force in their lives. Everyone needs to make a living. Everyone should be paid fairly for whay they do. And then we need to do everything in our power to take money off the table, to get it out of people's faces.

Studies have shown that things like happiness, type of work and the feeling of making meaningful progress consistantly rank higher than pay. And yet when those employees are asked what they though was important to others, most people said pay.

If you were a principal of a school and you had two teachers of equal value but one was clearly motivated more by the money than the act of teaching, which would you pick? Are the best teachers teaching for the money?

The role of money in the context of work is less prominent than we have assumed.

How do we define the word 'reward'?

To define a reward simply as 'getting something in return' is not accurate. A reward, or as B.F Skinner preferred to say, a reinforcement, is a part of operant conditioning - meaning that an action may be controlled by a stimulus that comes after rather than before.

Some people become distracted by the actual reward itself. I have nothing against candy, stickers, money or smiles. In fact, these can be beautiful gifts that can be bestowed upon those we care the most about. What bothers me greatly is how these things can be used conditionally. To offer these things in a conditional or contingent manner in order to obtain compliance is, ironically, far more heartless than the classroom I promote where the teacher would give candy, stickers and smiles out unconditionally.

Doling out rewards and bestwowing a gift upon someone are two very different things. One is conditional and unloving, while the other is unconditional and loving.

For more on defining rewards, and how the real problem is in the conditional nature of rewarding, read this interview with Alfie Kohn.

I rewarded my child with a computer if he achieved high marks in school, and now he continues to get high marks in school but I only gave him one computer. This proves to me that the use of rewards can encourage achievement.

The idea behind this comment is a familiar one. Basically, this person is assuming a correlation between the bribe and the student's success. And then assumes again that when weined off the bribe, the student still achieves.

The key word here is assume. Firstly, I am concerned that anyone would use the opportunity to learn as a reward or punishment. If I reward a student with a dictionary, he may become a better speller. Shouldn't I have given him the dictionary unconditionally, because it will help him to learn.

Is it not entirely plausible that the student continued to achieve because he had the computer as a tool to enhance his learning? It is far more reasonable to place this child's success on being afforded the opportunity to use the computer to enhance and support his learning - rather than thinking the parent deserves the credit in using operant conditioning to reinforce the child's behaviour.

Judy Cameron and David Pierce's book Rewards and Intrinsic Motivation: Resolving the Controversy uses scientific studies to show that rewards actually don't reduce people's interest in what they're doing.

Upon closer examination, Alfie Kohn's book Punished by Rewards (p260) offers this examination of Cameron's work :

"Cameron's assertion that rewards are basically innocuous depends on drawing conclusions selectively from the relevant research, omitting other studies, and blurring important distinctions. For example, her own review of the data confirms that when people expect to get a tangible reward for completing a task, they do indeed tend to spend less time on that task later than do people who were never promised a reward. But she is at pains to downplay this finding, preferring instead to emphasize that rewards seem not to be harmful under certain conditions, such as when people aren't expecting to receive them (which isn't terribly surprising).


Cameron also argues that negative effects are limited to tangible rewards, whereas the verbal kind are generally helpful. But the way she arrives at that conclusion is by (a) lumping together studies that define praise in very different ways, (b) failing to include studies that found negative effects of praise, and (c) distorting some of the studies that she does include. For example, she points to an experiment by Ruth Butler as proving that "extrinsic verbal rewards" produce extremely positive effects. But anyone who takes the trouble to look up that study will find that it actually distinguises between "comments"and "praise," finding impressive results from the former but discovering that the latter "did not even maintain initial interest at its baseline levels."

What evidence is there to show that rewards do harm to intrinsic motivation?

In 1999, Edward Deci, Richard Koestner and Richard Ryan conducted a meta-analysis which analyzed 128 experiments found that rewards had a significant negative effect on intrinsic motivation. These effects showed up regardless of age, including pre-school to college, with a wide range of interesting activities and with rewards ranging from dollar bills to marshmallows.

In the end, this new meta-analysis showed that "by far the most detrimental type" of reward was the one given "as a direct function of people's performance."


Because no child is at the top of Maslow's hierarchy, they need to be extrinsically motivated in order to progress to the next level.

There are a couple assumptions being made here. Firstly, intrinsic motivation is desirable but that doesn't necessarily mean that is has to be only found at higher levels of Maslow's hierarchy. Some environments may not meet these needs and fulfill our potential, but intrinsic motivation, seen as a function of these needs, is present from the start.

It is also important to note that there is no proof that human needs can be classified into 5 categories, as Maslow suggests. Even if we could assume our needs do fall into 5 categories, there is no proof that we actually transition from one stage to the next. For more on this, read Alfie Kohn's article on Maslow. These misassumptions can encourage some to wrongly assume that extrinsics are required to move from one stage to the next.

No good reason to grade

I have written quite a bit on abolishing grades, and today I want to impress upon you the idea that there is actually not one good reason to grade.

Here are the only three reasons I can think of that could possibly justify grading:

1) Motivation: Grades induce a kind of artificial, extrinsic motivation to strive for the reward of a high grade, or to avoid the punishment of a low grade. Either way, its the carrot or the stick that is the driving force.

2) Rank and Sort: Grades place students nicely on a fabricated heirarchy of haves and have-nots so that we can order those who are more worthy for post-secondary admissions and job placement.

3) Feedback: Grades provide students and parents with and idea where they stand.

I honestly can't think of any other reason to grade, and I honestly can't think of any good reason to use grades to achieve any of the three goals above.

Here's a quick look at why grades don't make the grade when it comes to achieving any of these goals.

Firstly, to fully grasp the chasm that exists between what science knows about motivation and what we typically do in schools, you must read Alfie Kohn's Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise and Other Bribes. The first 300 pages completes an autopsy on the idea of using extrinsic manipulators to achieve compliance, while the final 100 pages of notes, references and citations drive the final nail into the coffin. A basic summary would go something like this: there are actually two different kinds of motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic, and they are inversely related; meaning, that if one grows, the other will diminish.

Secondly, the issue here isn't that we are not sorting children well enough. Rather it is that we spend any time at all sorting them in the first place when we could be using our time and effort to help them improve. Ranking and sorting, bickering over grade inflation and rigid criteria and higher standards does nothing to help children become better people. Kohn puts it quite succinctly:

What grades offer is spurious precision, a subjective rating masquerading as an objective assessment.

Thirdly, reducing something as messy as real learning to a symbol, letter or number provides little to no useful information. It simply can't tell a kid what they have done or how they could get better. Studies have shown that grades are a pathetic way to provide students with feedback. Period.

Like so many things in life, we have become distracted. We have been distracted by grades, honor rolls, achievement, winning, losing, test scores, data... and the list goes on and on.

Let's refocus.

Assessment can be simplified into two steps.

1)Gather

2)Share

At first this may sound overly simplistic and rather benign, but here's the catch. You never need to use tests to gather, nor do you need grade to share.

So what do we do. I have mades some suggestions here. And I have more on this topic in the coming days.

For more on abolishing grading, check out this page.

Museum of Education

When museum curators of the future assemble an exhibit on American schooling in the twentieth century, they'll have many artifacts to choose from - chunky textbooks, dusty blackboards, one-piece injection-moldied desks with waraparound writing surfaces. But one item deserves special consideration. I recommend that in the center of the exhibition, enclosed in a sparkling glass case, the curators display a well sharpened No.2 pencil.

When Dan Pink wrote this in his book A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, I enjoyed the thought of what parts of school will become (if they haven't already) become obsolete and archaic.

My addition to this Museum would be:

GRADES

Here are some reasons why grades should be abolished. Each is a different article by Alfie Kohn:

• grades can only really be experienced as a reward or a punishment
• grades provide little to no information for students to use in order to actually improve
• grades distract everyone from our true objective: learning
• grades encourage competition rather than collaboration
• grades encourage students to regard learning as a chore
• grades discourage risk-taking
• grades encourage students to think less deeply
• grades encourage students to fall apart when they fail
• grades encourage students to focus on their ability rather than their effort
• grades encourage students to cheat
• grades encourage teachers to cheat
• grades are a poor predictor of the future
• grades encourage ranking and sorting rather than instruction and improvement

In 1976, Paul Dressel wrote a brilliant summary of what a grade actually means:

A mark or grade is an inadequate report of an inaccurate judgment by a biased and variable judge of the extent to which a student has attained an indefinite amount of material.

In my classroom, students only ever recieve a grade on the report card. For the rest of the year, my students only ever receive formative feedback that is either written or spoken.

When I share this with people, I inevitably get asked the question "If you don't give grades, how do you come up with a report card grade?"

For this I have three answers.

• My students collect the evidence of their learning in their paper an electronic portfolios. The paper one is nothing fancy - just a file folder and the electronic one takes the form of a discussion forum that I created using www.freeforums.org, or a class Ning at www.ning.com or class wiki at www.wikispaces.com.

• I am a professional. I spend 2 hours a day (or more) with each of my students for 10 months of the year. I get to know them quite well, so my professional judgement and intuitive thinking count for a lot - and have proven to be quite accurate (there is a wealth of evidence to support that teachers assessment of their students may be the most accurate form of assessment we can depend on)

• I ask the students to self-assess. It is amazing how close they come to picking the same grade that I would pick. Interestingly enough, when there is disagreement between me and them, they are usually too hard on themselves - and the odd time a kid over-inflates their grade, I either to decide to let it go or have I have a conversation with the student and make the adjustment.

For more on the abolishment of grades take a look at some of Alfie Kohn's books:

The Schools Our Children Deserve

Punshed by Rewards

For more on abolishing grading, check out this page.

To learn more about teachers who have or are abolishing grading, see the Grading Moratorium.

Standards and Standardization

I had the good fortune of listening to Sir Ken Robinson speak in Calgary, Alberta. He said many many inspiring things that evening including something to this effect:

"There is nothing wrong with having high standards, but who said that having high standards means everyone has to do the same thing. Having high standards and standardization are not the same."

So if we don't have to standardize in an effort to provide high standards for our children's education, then why is there so much standardization? Alfie Kohn writes about cui bono in his book Punished by Rewards. Cui bono meaning: who benefits?

Standardization rarely is in the best interest of student learning. Instead, standardization most benefits those who wish to collect data that can be analyzed and compared - allowing teachers, students and schools to be 'properly' ranked and sorted.

It's about ranking rather than rating.

I propose that we liberate our children's learning from their standardized prison cells. Personally, the best thing I ever did in order to liberate my students was to abolish grades. Without grades, I no longer felt like every student had to do the same assignment or same test. I didn't need 'data' that was quantifiable nor did I need to compare one student to another.