I was having a conversation today with a colleague about the potential benefits or hazards of giving real-world rewards to learners. For example, you might think that it would be motivational to pay somebody in cash every time they did well on a test. But it’s complicated.<\/p>\n
The situation can be described in terms of “playing a game”. When you practice the piano, or do a crossword puzzle, or engage in any other activity which challenges your brain, you are playing a kind of game.<\/p>\n
You know you won’t receive any tangible rewards for solving that crossword puzzle, yet you do it anyway. Your reward is the intellectual challenge itself.<\/p>\n
That’s why people usually don’t cheat on crossword puzzles. Of course you could just look up the answer, but then the challenge goes away. The entire enterprise would just become boring and pointless.<\/p>\n
But if you pay somebody to do something, you are actually inviting them to play a different game. This new game might be called “How much money can I make by doing this?”<\/p>\n
While the person is playing this new game, their goal is to win at the new game. So cheating at the first game no longer seems entirely pointless.<\/p>\n
In fact, earning money by looking up the answers or some other loophole can be a very effective way to win at the new game of making money. The monetary reward isn’t exactly inviting people to cheat, but it might manage to remove the motivation to win at the first game, by effectively replacing that game with a different game.<\/p>\n
Which is why paying somebody to score high on tests can actually backfire. You might just succeed in removing their motivation to learn.<\/p>\n
And that would be a bad thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was having a conversation today with a colleague about the potential benefits or hazards of giving real-world rewards to learners. For example, you might think that it would be motivational to pay somebody in cash every time they did well on a test. But it’s complicated. The situation can be described in terms of … Continue reading “Gaming games”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28370"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28370"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28370\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28371,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28370\/revisions\/28371"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}