Using performance-based scholarships for low-income parents has received positive feedback, according to a new study from the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, a nonprofit social policy research organization.
In the preface to the study, Gordon L. Berlin, president of MDRC, poses the question: “Can supplemental financial aid that is tied to academic performance help students complete their college studies?”
He would like you to believe so.
Berlin said MDRC’s “innovative strategy” is to “increase financial support for students and create an incentive to complete their courses, which in turn should accelerate their progress toward attaining a degree.”
An article in The Chronicle of Higher Education reported its apparent success: scholarships recipients took more courses, earned more credits and were usually full-time students and had less debt.
One would naturally draw from this an endorsement of incentivized performance.
But Dan Pink would disagree — and so should you.
Pink, writer and former speechwriter for former vice president and presidential candidate Al Gore, has been on a mission to change the business world. He presented his case at the TED convention in June 2009. TED is a small nonprofit “devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading.”
During his presentation, Pink discusses the connection between motivation and performance in the workplace.
He claims there is a clear distinction between 20th- and 21st-century thinking. That the 20th century motivators were shaped extrinsically — by carrots and sticks — and were only effective because the jobs of the 20th century were predominantly mechanistic.
However, when we carry these pre-conceived notions into the modern age, the results are often the reverse; financial teases become harmful to working potential.
According to Pink, this old model of thinking has “an incentive designed to sharpen thinking and accelerate creativity.” But instead, “it does just the opposite. It dulls thinking and blocks creativity.”
Pink believes that natural, non-material motivators like autonomy and purpose are the solution, and he acknowledges that these ideas may seem utopian and counterintuitive but he lets the facts do the talking.
Economist Dan Ariely, for example, used monetary rewards to entice MIT students to complete certain “games” as quickly as they could. The ones that involved only mechanical skill predictably thrived better under the pressure.
However, Pink says, if “the task called for even rudimentary cognitive skill, a larger reward led to poorer performance.”
He also points to examples of the success of self-motivated models of business like Wikipedia, the web-based encyclopedia written by volunteers, and Google, which allows its engineers to work on anything they want for 20 percent of their time.
Pink repeatedly states that this is the, “mismatch between what science knows and what business does.”
Wait — Gordon Berlin and MDRC told us that performance-based scholarships were effective. Does their study really reinforce the benefits of if-then motivators in education?
Well, actually, the “success” of the program seems feebler at second glance.
The program gave the students up to $1,800 for one academic year if they earned at least 12 credits, or $900 for six to 11 credits, while maintaining a 2.0 GPA.
This seems like an arbitrary incentive, given that a worse performance would negate any reason to attend school at all — you wouldn’t be passing your classes.
And the differences between the control group students and the incentivized students are less than the tone of the study would have you believe. Berlin describes them as “modest” but that is actually probably overstating the case.
The students with the incentive of scholarship money averaged only about one additional credit and were less likely to fail all of their classes.
It’s amazing what $1,800 will do, especially when you don’t set the bar very high.
Furthermore, one of the central premises of the study was to determine whether the scholarships improved the persistence of students in continuing their educations.
To this point, the study was completely inconclusive: an equal amount of students from both sample groups returned for the following term.
So maybe we shouldn’t be writing off Dan Pink just yet. Clearly, MDRC’s study produced a less significant impact than they would have you believe.
An idea that strikes close to home for many ASU students is that, now more than ever, schools are being run like businesses. So it is imperative that we explore and advance our knowledge of how to successfully motivate people and not glorify the weak results of a study because it affirms an outdated philosophy.
As science continues to reinforce intrinsic motivation as far superior to extrinsic incentives, faith in carrots and sticks just might finally be on its way out.
Pitch your motivational ideas at djoconn1@asu.edu
