Drive

I have yet to read Drive by Dan Pink, but I first learned of the book on an NPR segment and thought it was fascinating. According to research cited by Pink, when we are asked to perform at more than a rudimentary cognitive level, our performance does not increase, in fact it decreases, when offered high level incentives. I think that the correlation to our kids' performance on standardized tests is really interesting and I would love to see, do more research in this area. Standardized tests, for the time being, are a reality in our schools. I don't like them, lots of people don't like them, but I don't see them going anywhere at least in the next few years. So, that said, let's look at how we administer these tests and hoe we incentiveize them. Our school is a level 4 CIPS school (I think that is redundant but, whatever). We have recently submitted an formal, but not mandated, plan to get our school off of AYP soon. A big part of our problem is how our special education population is performing on the tests (the real problem is how we're educating them and we are discussing that a lot). One of the things we have done in the past years, and something that we reiterate as important on the plan that we submitted, is incentives for these tests. We have stickers and daily drawings and iPods and gift certificates. All of it. Now, I don't necessarily think that these are the types of incentives that Pink mentioned but, they are pretty big and we try to make a pretty big deal of them. However, according to the MIT study that Pink discusses, these incentives may actually be hurting performance. Again, I am not sure if these incentives are big enough to negatively affect performance but, I do think we should really rethink our incentive program. I wonder what would work better though, given that these tests do exist. This truly is a matter worth a lot more discussion at our school. I just hope we remember it next year when the time comes to talk about this topic!