Last week, I observed a discussion on Twitter related to Dan Pink’s new book, Driven: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. In this book, Pink reviews the psychological research related to motivation and applies it to business. On one side of the discussion, educators were excited about what we can learn about education from this book. On the other side was a strong critique of using business books to inform educational practice.

Pink’s Drive isn’t released (on Amazon, at least) yet, but this Ted Talk should give you a taste. (UPDATE: You can also read an interview with Public School Insights here.)

Pink states, “There is a mismatch between what science knows, and what business does.” The reward and punishment approach works for mechanistic “20th Century tasks.” However, it doesn’t work for cognitively intense “21st Century tasks.” This same statement is true in the classroom too. Extrinsic motivators and incentives may work to keep kids quiet, to keep them in their seats, and to compel them to memorize spelling lists and fact tables, but it builds a culture that trivializes learning. However, do we really need to wait for Dan Pink’s business book to tell us this?

Dan Pink is an engaging communicator and can present a well-crafted argument.  He is adept at “popularizing” research.  It is OK to read his book, but don’t forget - there are folks in education, experts even, that have already compellingly made this argument.

For example-

Alfie Kohn wrote about this nearly 20 years ago in the book Punished by Rewards.

In this groundbreaking book, Alfie Kohn shows that while manipulating people with incentives seems to work in the short run, it is a strategy that ultimately fails and even does lasting harm.  Our workplaces and classrooms will continue to decline, he argues, until we begin to question our reliance on a theory of motivation derived from laboratory animals.

Drawing from hundreds of studies, Kohn demonstrates that people actually do inferior work when they are enticed with money, grades, or other incentives. Programs that use rewards to change people’s behavior are similarly ineffective over the long run. Promising goodies to children for good behavior can never produce anything more than temporary obedience. In fact, the more we use artificial inducements to motivate people, the more they lose interest in what we’re bribing them to do. Rewards turn play into work, and work into drudgery.

Here is one of many examples from the research literature of mastery versus performance orientations and the impact on learning in science:

Pintrich and Sinatra (2003) state that a classroom environment that focuses on promoting mastery goals and dialogue for understanding is critical for learning to occur. The authors found that students hold one of two goals related to school achievement. Students that hold mastery goals focus on learning and understanding content. Students with performance goals focus on demonstrating their ability in comparison to other students. The researchers conclude that students who reported a focus on understanding as their primary goal orientation showed the greatest gains in conceptual understanding.

The students were actively engaged in activities and had an improved understanding of the concepts after the lessons. Students at the University of Michigan who endorsed mastery goal orientations showed a greater gain in their understanding of Newtonian physics than those students who did not endorse mastery goals. Students who espouse performance goals and do not endorse mastery goals show little or no improvement in conceptual understanding. In fact, performance goals without mastery goals have at best no effect on conceptual change, or may even hinder conceptual change. Mastery goals are promoted in contexts where the teachers emphasize learning and create situations where students can make choices and feel autonomous. Recognizing students for improvement can also help promote the adoption of mastery goals. Performance goals are promoted in contexts where teachers use normative grading and recognize students for their performance relative to others.

Dan Pink’s book is based on a wide body of research that has already been published. The premise of the book is that extrinsic motivators do not work for cognitively demanding tasks. That conclusion should be a ‘no-brainer’ for educators as it has been one of the pillars of progressive thinking for decades. But, instead of saying, “Well, duh!” educators will rush out (or online) to spend $20 to read how this applies to business.  What is the allure of books like A Whole New Mind, and Drive? Why do we need business “experts” to tell us what we should already know?

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Pintrich, P. R. & Sinatra, G.M. (2003) The role of Intentions in conceptual change learning. In G. M. Sinatra & P. R. Pintrich (Eds.), Intentional Conceptual Change. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.