What motivates K-12 students?

Imagine it’s 1995 and I tell you about 2 companies making an encyclopedia.

• Encyclopedia 1: One of the biggest companies in the world will put its massive resources to hire hire 100s of employees and spend millions of dollars to build the encyclopedia that they’ll sell.
• Encyclopedia 2: No one will be paid. We’ll ask hobbyists to spend their time creating it for us. They’ll have to volunteer their time. And then we’ll put it online for everyone to get it for free.

Which one will survive?

We know the answer now but back then it would have been ludicrous to think that Encyclopedia 2 (Wikipedia) would survive. No economist (or anyone) would have guessed Encyclopedia 1 (Microsoft’s MSN Encarta) wouldn’t make it.

What happened?

In order to understand, we need to look at what motivates people. In his book, Drive, Daniel Pink breaks down our historic views on motivation and how they’ve evolved over time.

• Motivation 1.0 — We were motivated by our survival needs.
• Motivation 2.0 — We are motivated by rewards and punishments.
• Motivation 3.0 — A desire to learn, to create, to better the world.

In the earliest days, Motivation 1.0 made sense. Think back to how the earliest days would have been — The premise is that we are motivated by surviving to get food and not being eaten by a saber-toothed tiger.

For the longest time, everyone has been operating under the belief that Motivation 2.0 works. You’re given a reward if you do well, a punishment if you don’t. It’s built into every organization from the day-to-day activities to compensation plans to bonuses. Hit your sales target and you’ll get X bonus. Complete this work and we’ll leave early for the day. The premise is that people are motivated by the rewards they are given… and from the fear of the punishment. They’ll do exactly what they need to do get the reward and not the punishment.

But what the science and Motivation 3.0 are telling us is that so much of our assumptions about what motivates us (Motivation 2.0) are completely wrong.

But wait… they do work, right? If we tell our children that we’ll go watch a movie if they clean their room, we’ll probably get that desired outcome.

Yes, that’s true….

So here’s the critical detail. Tasks we do at work (or home or school) can be broken into 1 of 2 categories.

• Algorithmic: An algorithmic task is one in which you follow a set of established instructions down a single pathway to one conclusion. That is, there’s an algorithm for solving it.
• Heuristic: A heuristic task is the opposite. Precisely because no algorithm exists for it, you have to experiment with possibilities and devise a novel solution.

Working on the line at a factory is mostly algorithmic. You do pretty much the same thing over and over in a certain way. Creating an ad campaign is mostly heuristic. You have to come up with something new

For algorithmic tasks, extrinsic rewards work. For heuristic tasks, rewards may not just be helpful…. they can actually be harmful.

Going back to the Wikipedia / MSN Encarta, it now becomes much more clear. The heuristic task of making an encyclopedia brought out an army of volunteers and enthusiasts that had intrinsic reasons for putting in 20–30 hours + a week. When MSN Encarta shut down in 2009, it had 62,000 articles. Wikipedia, on the other hand, had 2.8 million articles. Microsoft’s rewards system had no chance.

In short, Microsoft’s rewards approach causes major problems when it comes to completing heuristic tasks. Pink lays out the “seven deadly flaws” of the carrot and stick system.

Let’s connect this to how our K-12 system works.

Our traditional school system relies on Motivation 2.0 (rewards system). Exhibit this behavior (study) and you’ll get the reward / carrot (good grades). It works in the short term and for algorithmic tasks. But for heuristic tasks / ones that require creativity, problem solving, and us to use our right brains), using motivation 2.0 tactics may “impair performance”.

The Acton Academy learner-driven education model is built around Motivation 3.0 and the belief that the love of learning is intrinsic. There is a reason why we don’t do grades. They don’t motivate on heuristic tasks. Students at schools try to get the right answer (or the ones teachers like) rather than just being their creative selves (flaw #3 in the graphic above).

“Careful consideration of reward effects reported in 128 experiments lead to the conclusion that tangible rewards tend to have a substantially negative effect on intrinsic motivation,” they determined. “When institutions — families, schools, businesses, and athletic teams, for example — focus on the short-term and opt for controlling people’s behavior,” they do considerable long-term damage.

Rewards do damage? Yes, when applied incorrectly, they can actually hurt the outcome.

Through an experiment, we saw the Red Cross would actually get FEWER donors if they started paying for blood donations. By paying people, you take out the altruistic act of doing good and people are less motivated to donate.

As educators, what can we do to make our classrooms more like Motivation 3.0 rather than Motivation 2.0.

Our young learners are growing up in a world where they need to use their right-brain and the 4 C’s (Creativity, Collaboration, Critical thinking, and Communication). The algorithmic tasks are now being done by computers. You have machines taking over factories, robots completing basic (and ever more complex) tasks, and machine learning software being built at every major company.

The world has changed so much since the industrial revolution. How we look at motivation has to as well.

We’re no longer in the industrial revolution where rewards / punishment are important to help churn more stuff out of a factory. The information age is a heuristic one and we need to focus on intrinsic rewards.

Pink lays out different ideas for what Educators may be able to do.

1. Ask whether homework is important by asking these 3 questions:

• Am I offering students any autonomy over how and when to do this work?
• Does this assignment promote mastery by offering a novel, engaging task (as opposed to rote reformulation of something already covered in class)?
• Do my students understand the purpose of this assignment? That is, can they see how doing this additional activity at home contributes to the larger enterprise in which the class is engaged?

If the question is no to any of the above, see if you can change up / re-purpose the homework so each of the questions is a “yes”.

2. Have a Fedex Day

Dedicate an entire day where the learners work on a problem they want to solve. As educators, we can help them gather the necessary material but the goal is to give them enough time to solve the problem.

3. DIY Report Cards

Grades are largely meaningless feedback. Really, what does an A in the second quarter of Algebra II really mean? Instead, have the young learners create their own goals for the semester and then have them grade themselves on the progress towards those goals.

4. Praise effort, not performance

In alignment with building a Growth Mindset and Carol Dweck’s “Power of Yet” approach, Pink lays out a few ideas:

• Praise effort and strategy, not intelligence
• Make praise specific
• Praise in private
• Offer praise only when there is a good reason for it

5. Help the learners see the big picture

Too often, our learners don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing. Why am I taking this standardized test? Why do I have to read this book? What’s the point of this writing exercise?

Help them understand these questions: Why am I learning this? How is it relevant to the world I live in now?

6. Take a lesson from unschoolers / homeschoolers

Unschoolers promote autonomy by allowing learners to decide what they want to learn and how they want to learn it

Recapping the rewards system — how and when should you use it? Pink lays out this helpful chart to use.

Education needs to evolve in many ways. How we look at motivation is one of those keys.