Motivating Students With Cash-For-Grades Incentive

En el United Arab Emirates, el gobierno ha desarrollado una política de
incentivos monetarios por buenas notas (calificaciones) para motivar a
sus alumnos. Mientras hay un debate académico sobre los meritos de
programas de este tipo, el profesor Reci, psicologo de Rochester,
explica las complejidades de políticas de este tipo y porque son
atractivos para gobiernos (facil de implementar con resultados en el
corto plazo):

“It is easy to get people to do things by paying them if you’ve got
enough money and they’ve got the necessary skills,” he said. “But they
will keep doing it only as long as you keep paying them. And even if
they were doing it before, when you stop paying them the behavior drops
to a lower level than when you started paying them. We’ve done thousands
of experiments on this over 40 years and the data is incredibly robust.”

“There is no evidence that paying people helps them learn — and a lot of
evidence that it doesn’t,” Mr. Deci said. Then why do parents — and
governments like the U.A.E. — resort to paying students? “Because it’s
easy,” Mr. Deci said. “It’s much harder to work with people to get them
motivated from the inside.”

Gregory Elacqua

--------------------------

NYTimes
November 20, 2011
Motivating Students With Cash-For-Grades Incentive
By D.D. GUTTENPLAN

DOHA, QATAR — It is a problem every parent — and every teacher — has
faced: how best to motivate students to work and study. In the United
Arab Emirates, the government has decided to try an approach many
exasperated parents have considered: cash payments for good grades.

At the recent WISE education summit meeting here, the lively discussion
after a panel on student experiences showed a considerable gap in
perspective between participants from countries where poverty was the
main barrier to higher education and those where students’ leisure
pursuits were a potential distraction.

Shaika Al Maskari said that while in many parts of the world education
was seen as a route out of deprivation, in the affluent societies of the
Arabian Peninsula, where wealth seems to come from the ground, students
are easily diverted from their studies by the lure of the Internet or
peer pressure to socialize.

Dr. Al Maskari, a businesswoman who has run her family’s Abu Dhabi-based
energy trading and oil services conglomerate for the past two decades,
is a firm supporter of the U.A.E.’s Scholarship System, under which
students who achieve a grade point average of 3.6 or above are paid a
monthly stipend by the government.

According to the Abu Dhabi Education Council, the Scholarship System
stipulates that students “be of good conduct and should not have been
convicted of any offences involving moral turpitude.” Students are also
required to attend classes regularly.

The program covers tuition fees and living expenses for students who
study in approved universities. Only U.A.E. nationals are eligible.

Mohammed Al Maskari, a former deputy director of the Abu Dhabi Education
Zone, said in an interview that students who perform well in certain
majors like medicine or engineering receive a monthly stipend of 5,000
dirhams, or about $1,300, a month. “Kids like to be in groups, to be
with their friends, and to take the easiest courses,” he said. “This is
a way of steering them into areas that are needed.”

Jane Kinninmont, a Middle East specialist at London’s Chatham House, the
Royal Institute for International Affairs, said, “The countries in the
Gulf face a real problem.”

Historically, she said, an individual’s wages in the U.A.E. were tied
more to nationality and family background than to educational
achievement. Because of the country’s vast oil wealth “entitlement to a
public sector job is seen as part of the social contract,” Ms.
Kinninmont said, making it seem unnecessary to achieve academically.

“The U.A.E. and Qatar also have the highest rates of immigration in the
world,” she added. “In some ways that’s nice for them. They can rely on
an army of underpaid workers. But 85 percent of the population are not
citizens. A majority of the country doesn’t speak Arabic. They see their
culture being eroded. The government would like to reduce their reliance
on foreigners — at least for skilled professions like law or medicine or
engineering. So they turn to cash to try to incentivize education.”

Many countries around the world use some form of financial incentive to
encourage students. In the United States, where most universities are
private and tuition fees are high, scholarships based on merit are often
awarded to the brightest applicants to encourage them to attend a
particular school. In Europe, where fees are generally lower, bursaries
for travel abroad are common, and some institutions, like the University
of Amsterdam, offer merit scholarships to “outstanding students from
outside the European Economic Area” who would otherwise face steep
tuition fees. But the use of outright cash payments for good grades is
far less common. Last year Time magazine reported on the controversy
that erupted when Roland Fryer, a professor at Harvard’s Educational
Innovation Laboratory, proposed paying fourth graders in New York up to
$25 for doing well on tests. “Most adults work primarily for money, and
in a curious way, we seem to be holding kids to a higher standard than
we hold ourselves,” Dr. Fryer told Time.

Philip Altbach, director of the Center for International Higher
Education at Boston College, pointed out that “in China academics are
given extra money — often significant amounts — if they publish in good
journals.” But he went on to say, “In my opinion just giving money to
students to spend as they wish is not right. Higher education is
sufficiently part of the ‘market’ already.”

Most educators seem to find the very idea distasteful. Even Mourad
Tlili, a spokesman for the Abu Dhabi Education Council, insists that
cash incentives are used “along with more common forms of recognition
like certificates of appreciation, honors listing and letters of
recognition.” Out of 838 students enrolled in the Scholarship System,
“this year 139 students have been given different kinds of incentives,”
he said.

Jamil Salmi, higher education coordinator for the World Bank, said that
in his native Morocco the government did pay some students to attend
teacher training colleges. “But these were not their first choice
colleges, and the country had a shortage of qualified teachers,” he
said. “In Colombia students lose their scholarships if they don’t keep
up their grades. That has had a very powerful effect on dropout rates.
But to give money as an entitlement in exchange for academic achievement
— my sense is that it is a mistake.”

Andreas Schleicher, an education expert at the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development, said: “My personal view is that this is
going in the wrong direction. If we cannot convince students of the
relevance of what they learn and that the economic and social benefits
they derive from learning outweigh their costs then there is something
fundamentally wrong.”

However widely held, do such views represent anything more than
entrenched prejudice? Edward Deci maintains they do. “What we think of
as the amount of motivation is not nearly as important as the type of
motivation,” said Mr. Deci, a professor of psychology at the University
of Rochester and the author of “Why We Do What We Do.”

“It is easy to get people to do things by paying them if you’ve got
enough money and they’ve got the necessary skills,” he said. “But they
will keep doing it only as long as you keep paying them. And even if
they were doing it before, when you stop paying them the behavior drops
to a lower level than when you started paying them. We’ve done thousands
of experiments on this over 40 years and the data is incredibly robust.”

“There is no evidence that paying people helps them learn — and a lot of
evidence that it doesn’t,” Mr. Deci said. Then why do parents — and
governments like the U.A.E. — resort to paying students? “Because it’s
easy,” Mr. Deci said. “It’s much harder to work with people to get them
motivated from the inside.”

Mr. Schleicher also suggested that while paying students for performance
might seem like a quick fix, getting students, in the U.A.E. or
elsewhere, really committed to their studies would be a long-term
effort, starting with changes to the curriculum.

“If you were running a supermarket and day after day, year after year,
you would see that 30 out of 100 customers leave your shop without
buying anything — not even to mention that education is free — then you
would start to change your inventory. That is the missing link in
education, not financial incentives,” he said.