Grades: What do they really motivate? (part 1)
Grades: What do they really motivate? Recently, in my psychology class, we looked at what motivates us and how these specific types of motivation affect the way we perceive these situations in the future. Our focus was around intrinsic and extrinsic rewards and we even had a brief discussion of motivating teachers using monetary rewards based on test scores (at first they were all in...then they found all of the flaws with this system). Here is a brief snippet of a meta-analytic review out of Rochester University ( Deci, Ryan, Koestner, 1990 ) (or the Harvard Business Review that we looked at, Chamorro-Premuzic ) " More specifically, for every standard deviation increase in reward, intrinsic motivation for interesting tasks decreases by about 25%. When rewards are tangible and foreseeable (if subjects know in advance how much extra money they will receive) intrinsic motivation decreases by 36%." In other words, when we expect an extrinsic motivation, o...