Teach Effectively!

In “Gates Foundation to study ‘cash for grades’: Organization will analyze whether incentive payments to low-income college students are effective,” Gale Holland of the Los Angeles (CA, US) Times reported that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will fund a large-scale study of whether cash payments to low-income college students improves outcomes.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is throwing its weight behind the trend to offer “cash for grades” to keep low-income students in college, despite protests from some quarters that such incentive payments amount to little more than bribery.

The foundation will devote $13 million to study whether paying low-income college students between $1,000 to $4,000 to stay on track is effective, officials said today. The cash payments themselves will be made by programs in California and several other states.

Although Ms. Holland’s story does not specify the contingencies, it appears that students must complete a half-time course of study each semester and earn grades of C or better to earn the cash. If this is the case, then the rewards may be misplaced. Although sustaining a given level of classes is a good idea, it is important that those classes are specific to advancing toward a degree (not out-of-program,”fun” classes). Also, lots of factors go into grades; it’s important that the contingencies focus on specific learning outcomes (e.g., competence in completing the steps of experiments in chemistry).

Misplaced contingencies are too common, in my view, in education. Reinforcement has powerful effects on behavior, and demonstrations that rewards “don’t work” almost invariably reduce to examples of misplaced contingencies, I suspect. So, I’d like to see an alternative comparison in which curriculum-based measures were developed and there were three conditions: (a) control, (b) cash rewards for the apparent plan in this study, and (c) cash for highly specific learning outcomes measured by the CBM tasks.

Inevitably, some criticized the the program as bribery. That’s a common misunderstanding about the reinforcement, which (were this a reinforcement system) needs to be countered. I plan to return to it either here on Teach Effectively or over on Behavior Management.

Link to Ms. Holland’s story.