Saturday, June 26, 2010

How to get Johnny to study - The Boston Globe

How to get Johnny to study - The Boston Globe

How to get Johnny to study

Surprising insights from the social sciences

By Kevin Lewis
June 27, 2010
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How do we motivate kids — especially kids in rough situations — to want education? Researchers at the University of Michigan studied middle school students in Detroit and found that, while almost 90 percent expected to go to college, only half wanted a career that actually required education. And this difference was critical. Students whose career goals did not require education (e.g., sports star, movie star) spent less time on homework and got lower grades. The good news is that the researchers found it was easy to make education more salient, and thereby motivate kids. When students were shown a graph depicting the link between education and earnings, they were much more likely to hand in an extra-credit homework assignment the next day than if they were shown a graph depicting the earnings of superstars.
Destin, M. & Oyserman, D., “Incentivizing Education: Seeing Schoolwork as an Investment, Not a Chore,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (forthcoming)
The spirit of capitalism
One of the classic works of sociology is “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” by Max Weber, who argues that the former facilitates the latter. Scholars have been trying to test this theory ever since, typically by analyzing economic patterns at the international level. An ideal scientific test of the theory, however, would require randomly indoctrinating one group of people with one


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