Education Bookcast

You'll remember from Daniel Pink's Drive (episode 2) that common assumptions about how rewards affect motivation and behaviour have it all wrong. Common sense tells us that to motivate somebody to do a better job, we should offer them a material reward, but scientific experiments show us that this is one of the best ways to demotivate people. Perhaps you weren't so easily convinced. Well, good news! Alfie Kohn has written a book which argues in the finest detail and with the most colossal empirical support that rewards are bad for you and for everyone else. Starting off with an argument from principle, that there's something sinister and potentially immoral about offering rewards in the first place, he continues with a book-length exposition of all the terrible things that rewards can do, according to experimental psychology. Why should you care? Because, if you're a teacher giving out grades for assignments, then the evidence strongly suggests that you are undermining your students' motivation. If you're a p