Rewarding outcomes rather than behavior teaches children nothing more than which outcomes are rewarded and which are punished.
In contrast, rewarding successive approximations teaches children how to learn. In our first actions in a new environment, we make the connection between behavior and outcomes. We do this best when we have have fast and accurate outcomes to experience.
When you leave children on their own or in the care of education majors, and test them only quarterly, they've no way of connecting their hour-by-hour behavior to their lousy scores. They probably assume that they're dumb, or that their teachers are. No one is that dumb though. To fail the most basic of tests after 12 years in school? This was unheard of in my day. The kids aren't dumb and the teachers don't suck. The children just don't pay attention or remember a damned thing their teachers say. I think it's because they haven't learned that they ought to. Sure, we tell them they ought to, and we buy them iPads to focus their attention on something. But we never show them that their future depends on what they did in the last 60 minutes, all day long, for 12 years.
If you quiz them daily on what you've just taught, they can perhaps make the connection between paying attention and doing well on quizzes. Why? Because it just happened. The children inadvertently experience an ongoing a/b quasi-experiment on the relationship between their behavior and their test performance: it's fresh in their minds.
I guess I am just saying that the tests are too hard for the kids we have now. They don't know the answers, so that's obvious. But, I'd rather we examine results of a child's daily quizzes for a year than how she did on an infrequent exams. The process would help teach a novel behavior in a new environment, in this case, "learning." Daily quizzes are chances to connect behavior to outcomes, which is the only way to teach anything, whether to a cat, a rat, or a curious child.
In contrast, rewarding successive approximations teaches children how to learn. In our first actions in a new environment, we make the connection between behavior and outcomes. We do this best when we have have fast and accurate outcomes to experience.
When you leave children on their own or in the care of education majors, and test them only quarterly, they've no way of connecting their hour-by-hour behavior to their lousy scores. They probably assume that they're dumb, or that their teachers are. No one is that dumb though. To fail the most basic of tests after 12 years in school? This was unheard of in my day. The kids aren't dumb and the teachers don't suck. The children just don't pay attention or remember a damned thing their teachers say. I think it's because they haven't learned that they ought to. Sure, we tell them they ought to, and we buy them iPads to focus their attention on something. But we never show them that their future depends on what they did in the last 60 minutes, all day long, for 12 years.
If you quiz them daily on what you've just taught, they can perhaps make the connection between paying attention and doing well on quizzes. Why? Because it just happened. The children inadvertently experience an ongoing a/b quasi-experiment on the relationship between their behavior and their test performance: it's fresh in their minds.
I guess I am just saying that the tests are too hard for the kids we have now. They don't know the answers, so that's obvious. But, I'd rather we examine results of a child's daily quizzes for a year than how she did on an infrequent exams. The process would help teach a novel behavior in a new environment, in this case, "learning." Daily quizzes are chances to connect behavior to outcomes, which is the only way to teach anything, whether to a cat, a rat, or a curious child.
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