Carly Robinson

 

For this post, I interviewed Carly Robinson about her paper “The Demotivating Effect (and Unintended Message) of Awards.” Carly is a PhD candidate in Education at Harvard University. In her research, she focuses on experimentally testing specific measures that can be taken to improve students’ educational outcomes.

This paper is co-authored with Jana Gallus, Monica Lee, and Todd Rogers. The award that this paper looks at is one given to middle and high school students in California for excellent attendance. Several studies have shown that students with better attendance perform better in school. In many states, average daily attendance rates are also a determinant of funding for school districts. So, schools might be motivated to increase attendance for both of these reasons. 

The standard intuition that most of us have for awards more generally is that once someone receives one for an accomplishment, we would expect them to continue to strive to achieve in that realm.  In fact, in California, the government has encouraged schools to recognize students for good attendance. These authors wanted to see how effective different types of rewards were in encouraging good attendance after the announcement of the award. So, they conducted a field experiment. A field experiment is like an experiment in the lab, but it’s done out in the real world. These researchers conducted their experiment on more than 15,000 middle and high school students in California. There were three groups of students: one group didn’t get an award (the control group), one group was told that they had the chance to earn an award for having perfect attendance in February (a prospective award for their future behavior), and one earned a retrospective award for already having perfect attendance in a previous month. The retrospective award was an unannounced, surprise award.   

The researchers expected both award groups to have better attendance than the control group. But what they found was that those students who received the surprise, retrospective award missed 8% more days of school in February than those who did not receive an award. And the attendance of the students who had a chance to earn an award in February – the prospective group – was no different than that of the control group in that month. But in March their attendance decreased. So, both types of awards actually led to reduced attendance after the award period was over.

So, what’s happening here? The researchers think that, once students earn an award, they believe that  they have at least met, and likely surpassed what’s expected of them, and so they feel licensed to miss school going forward. And, interestingly, the researchers also find that academically low performing students have more absences after the award period than their high performing peers. Since these students are probably least likely to enjoy school, they may use having earned the attendance award to negotiate missing more school going forward. 

So, our standard intuition, and California’s recommendations, don’t appear to be working as intended! And, just in case you think that you should have known better: the researchers surveyed teachers and administrators; and only 2% of them predicted that an award would reduce attendance after the award period. 

I asked Carly what recommendations she has for improving school attendance, since awards don’t seem to work.  First, she pointed out that one reason these awards might not work is that good attendance is something that students should be doing all the time, and it is therefore not really award-worthy. A better way to reduce absences is to keep parents informed. Carly says that parents chronically underestimate their children’s absences. In this paper, you can see the results of another field experiment in which Carly and her coauthors gave parents real time information about the number of days their children had missed. As a result, attendance did improve.  

Let’s talk! I would love to know what you think about this example of unintended consequences. Please submit comments and questions.