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Incentivisation Beyond Grades?
I’ve been spending a lot of time considering how we (education) can create incentives for students that they are relevant in their lives. For me, grades are archaic and irrelevant; I find increasingly that students push themselves for grades because they are important for their parents and teachers, more than for themselves. I also feel as though the wrong indicators are incentivised.
I’m very curious to learn if other educators have discovered incentives beyond grades that actually work. Which indicators do you incentivise, and how are these incentives practically applied?
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Thinking along the same lines. It needs to be internal, they need to have their own narrative that assigns ‘meaning’ to what they are learning. This narrarive could be: this is useful to my short/long term goal, this answers a question I am already thinking about or a problem I am currently trying to solve/ work on.. etc. I think removing those external incentives and allowing the space for the internal incentives to develop and mature is key here.
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Student-centered learning will hook them in. THEY get to focus on the topic. THEY get to choose which type of summative assessment. THEY get to select the criteria. And THEY get to self-assess.
Make them a part of the process. The “grade” just documents that they met the agreed upon objective.
It’s also teaching about how to design a good contract! ????
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To piggyback on what Mariam and Jennifer have said, meaningful learning is key. That of course, can mean different things for every single child. But each child certainly shares similar interests and finds similar things meaningful.
We all know children are interested in games, so how can your lesson be gamified in a way that is meaningful to their lives? However you design your lesson, it needs to require students transfer the knowledge they have retained. Lessons should try to achieve these goals for meaningful learning to happen: understand the knew knowledge, apply it, analyze it, evaluate it, and create with it.
This article explains all of this better than I can: http://web.mit.edu/jrankin/www/teach_transfer/rote_v_meaning.pdf
I’m in the early stages of creating a D&D curriculum for my school’s EFL language lessons and I have a few pilot classes going on at different language levels (basic and intermediate) so I’m very interested in this topic.
Here is a mind map I created that displays how the transfer of knowledge works when students play Dungeons and Dragons.
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Hi Carl,
I love the D&D idea. I’ve been overseeing a D&D club at our school; it’s been a bit hit and miss, as school has been largely online for us and they are tired of screen time, but the guild continues to grow. I had not thought of using this as a language tool. Great idea! I’d love to hear more about how you apply this.
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I’m studying human development across the lifespan at Oregon State right now, here are examples of how to improve intrinsic motivation (see attached file)
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Fantastic thread!
Similar to the intrinsic motivation comments, I think we are often blind to or ignore student’s implicit motives. Those motives that are aroused by incentives experienced in doing something, not because of explicit incentives such as rewards, grades etc. One relevant implicit motive in this situation is the need for achievement, or doing something well. However, one of the challenges of implicit motives is that even though we know they exist, predict intrinsic interests and spontaneous behaviours, and are often incongruent with self-attributed motives, they are very difficult to measure (not captured by self-report questions). This makes them difficult to incorporate and inform how we teach and support students. For me, a clear challenge is how to create a learning environment that comprises activities that interact with a student’s implicit motives (as well as explicit ones), which in turn should lead to increased positive emotions, engagement and learning.
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