Tutoring children

[Imogen]

Question: http://theboard.byu.edu/questions/65546/


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

I saw this during my leadership class the other day, and it was very eye-opening. the question and answers reminded me of it.

[Elephant]

I'm glad CPM commented on how rewarding children can definitely be a grey area with regards to their learning. Getting kids to learn definitely isn't just a function of whether or not you give them candy. At the same time, it's not quite a clear-cut as his answer might suggest. Some research suggests very high gains from rewarding children--a study from a Harvard economist produced very significant gains for students in one city who were paid to get good grades (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/artic ... -2,00.html). Fairly, results in other cities were mixed--it seemed to be dependent on how the payment scheme was structured.

At the heart of the issue seems to be whether or not kids were doing well beforehand. If they were not, there's no "intrinsic motivation" to be affected by the reward. If they were, you have to be quite a bit more careful to get it right. Since Imelda tutors children, it's fair to assume that at least some of her kids are being tutored because of low results in school. They, therefore, may benefit a great deal from being rewarded for their learning.

[TheAnswerIs42]

This is really interesting to me, because this sort of thing is a big part of parenting toddlers. We have been potty training my daughter for about a year and a half now. She is quite smart, fully able to go on her own, and she has honestly decided that she just doesn't care. She will have a small accident, stop herself, and walk around wet until someone forces her to stop playing with her toys and go change. We tried little rewards every time she went, we tried big daily rewards she picked out herself, we tried little punishments, we tried big punishments - but the thing I kept coming back to is that none of that mattered. Or, better put, the original goal still didn't matter to her, and only the rewards or punishments mattered a little bit. At the end, she has to want to stay dry. Period. Until she dislikes being wet more than she dislikes going to the bathroom a few times a day, no progress will be made. The only way she will stay dry right now is if I force her to go every hour or two - meaning, I am the one being trained here, not her.

Meanwhile, one of the main "camps" for Autism teaching methods is ABA (Applied Behavior Analysis), which takes the reward system to a new level. Every time a kid does something good, they are given a very small reward - like one M&M or something. Since many of these kiddos don't have any motivation to do the things adults are trying to get them to do - like share a toy, or answer a question right - the idea is that the kids will see the quick little reward and wire their brain to understand that "what I did was a good thing". I'm sure it does wonders for a lot of kids, but I much prefer the DIR method, where everything is based on relationships. My son rarely sees the connection between what he did and what he received. He just thinks someone randomly gave him an M&M for no reason, and it is hilarious to watch. One of his classmates got to the point where he would only participate in class (sing the song, etc) if he saw the M&M waiting for him. No phasing out the reward for that guy!

In terms of the original question, I have done a lot of tutoring for middle/high school kids, and it never occured to me to give little rewards. Ever. I think I rememer Sylvan had some sort of reward system when I worked there years ago, but none of the kids seemed really motivated by it. The reason tutoring works - the motivation - is that parents are informing their kids (by their actions or perhaps verbally) that your education matters to me so much that I am spending x dollars an hour for you to improve, so you better get what you can out of it. The kids are rewarded when they actually understand what is going on in class instead of feeling helplessly lost, or when their grades pick up and they get all their assignments finally turned in. Maybe the rewards are a good idea for littler kids, but I never saw a need in my age group.

[Talons]

Interesting article. I wonder why paying kids to read books seemed to help.

I guess that was kind of what happened to me. We kept track of our reading on calendars, and at the end of the month we could get a free pizza if we had read enough days. I always liked reading, but the pizza, or maybe even just the calendar, may have helped me remember to read more.

[Whistler]

I agree with Elephant here. It's not quite as simple as CPM was saying, but it is indeed interesting that sometimes rewards have an effect opposite its intended.

[Portia]

I once told one of my students, with a huge smile, that "learning is its own reward!" I think with math, at least, there really is an adrenaline rush of the "aha" moment when a solution checks through, or a factored polynomial can be reconstructed into its component parts. There is negotiation, though, as to how much time we spend on one item or another, whether we get to play a game, etc.

Could it be argued that grades are just a grown-up carrot to dangle in front of somebody's nose? I was hyper-aware of the social status that comes with grades, to the point of having a meltdown at the prospect of even an A-minus. Excellent standardized test scores arguably translated to a tangible benefit later in life (real $ for college, e.g.), but I am somewhat unconvinced that being able to ace tests is a good in and of itself. I have a strong incentive to keep the current status quo in place, but I definitely prefer to see independent thinking in my students. I'm impressed with the student who notices that 3 1/7 is a good approximation of pi, or a coworker who codes a smartphone game: putting knowledge to good use, rather than just on a Scantron.