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Young children would rather explore than get rewards

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Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#51

Post by dmead »

ornornor wrote: post #23
dmead wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is mastery a new word that's come up in education? i can't help but (red) flag that word in the context of teaching children these days, maybe before the wrong people have said it.

What? Why?

I was right.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning#General_conce...

The only person I've heard say "mastery" are Betsy devos (when she was getting grilled by warren at her senate confirmation) and some religious conservatives i know that homeschool their children.

My general impression is that it's a marketing gimmick by carter schools that want to show they're somehow innovating in education. This is probably all horse shit as the longer term outcomes in devos type schools are really bad (see: michigan).

anyway, it's a flag. probably a big red one.

I doubt it's taken seriously by regular school teachers whos models come from Columbia university.

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#52

Post by euske »

atoav wrote: post #40
adrianN wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often see criticism of the school system like yours. I think it comes from a perspective of a fairly intelligent, self-motivated individual, probably from a family that valued education. However many children lack one or more of those factors. For them the intrinsic motivation is to play video games all day, or talk to their friends, or smoke weed. There is no intrinsic motivation for most children to learn all the…

As someone who in his (mandatory in my country) social year worked with "difficult" kids: for nearly every kid there is intrinsic motivations you can find. Of course that isn't easy and requires much more teachers and a bit more flexibility when it comes to which topics to learn, but good education is making every bodies life better and should be IMO much higher valued both in societal and monetary terms.

I think the major obstacle here is the cost. Since intrinsic motivators vary a lot from person to person, the program has to be customized for individual learners. Unless every kid has an individual tutor or something, this isn't feasible. Most education problems are basically a money problem.

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#53

Post by coddle-hark »

acituan wrote: post #46
atoav wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who in his (mandatory in my country) social year worked with "difficult" kids: for nearly every kid there is intrinsic motivations you can find. Of course that isn't easy and requires much more teachers and a bit more flexibility when it comes to which topics to learn, but good education is making every bodies life better and should be IMO much higher valued both in societal and monetary terms.

> for nearly every kid there is intrinsic motivations you can find I think this can be generalized to all humans. It would be near impossible for a true lack of intrinsic motivation to have made it through evolutionary selection. Like you say, what matters is matching the child's potential with what is available in their current environment, and institutional schooling might be a very blunt tool for that. Not only it…

> It would be near impossible for a true lack of intrinsic motivation to have made it through evolutionary selection.

Be careful making assumptions like that. Suicidal tendencies made it through evolutionary selection, after all.

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#54

Post by throwaway5792 »

dmead wrote: post #51
ornornor wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Why?

I was right. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning#General_conce... The only person I've heard say "mastery" are Betsy devos (when she was getting grilled by warren at her senate confirmation) and some religious conservatives i know that homeschool their children. My general impression is that it's a marketing gimmick by carter schools that want to show they're somehow innovating in education. This is probab…

So what's wrong with it?

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#55

Post by kqr »

euske wrote: post #52
atoav wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who in his (mandatory in my country) social year worked with "difficult" kids: for nearly every kid there is intrinsic motivations you can find. Of course that isn't easy and requires much more teachers and a bit more flexibility when it comes to which topics to learn, but good education is making every bodies life better and should be IMO much higher valued both in societal and monetary terms.

I think the major obstacle here is the cost. Since intrinsic motivators vary a lot from person to person, the program has to be customized for individual learners. Unless every kid has an individual tutor or something, this isn't feasible. Most education problems are basically a money problem.

Student-to-student tutoring is super effective.

Even if most students suck as tutors (which they probably do – tutoring is difficult), the benefits outweigh the problems by a big margin. Most importantly, it allows each student the desired individual focus. But it also improves the tutors' memories of the classes they used to take.

I'm baffled it's not more widely employed in lower education. (Higher education seems to get it right by using former students as TAs. Although then it happens against payment. I'd argue for simply making it part of the regular curriculum.)

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#56

Post by atoav »

euske wrote: post #52
atoav wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who in his (mandatory in my country) social year worked with "difficult" kids: for nearly every kid there is intrinsic motivations you can find. Of course that isn't easy and requires much more teachers and a bit more flexibility when it comes to which topics to learn, but good education is making every bodies life better and should be IMO much higher valued both in societal and monetary terms.

I think the major obstacle here is the cost. Since intrinsic motivators vary a lot from person to person, the program has to be customized for individual learners. Unless every kid has an individual tutor or something, this isn't feasible. Most education problems are basically a money problem.

I managed with ~4 kids at once, but it was one of the most exhausting jobs I ever had (which includes street/road work in the summer and carrying stone tiles up houses).

Education problems are indeed money problems.

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#57

Post by rajansaini »

jariel wrote: post #37
kqr wrote: post #4

For anyone interested in this type of stuff, I can recommend reading Drive . Briefly, human behaviour can be motivated for extrinsic and intrinsic reasons. The rewards in this article are extrinsic motivators. Exploring is rewarding in an intrinsic way; it is a strive towards autonomy, mastery, and purpose. In adults (and in older children) applying extrinsic motivators kills intrinsic motivation. Once the extrinsic…

This is all fine and good but it misses some much more fundamental drivers, not those that are narrowly instinctive. If you want to play the violin beautifully, you have to practice for 10 years, there's no way around it. If you want to do important things, you have to train in all sorts of capacities, and put in a lot of sweat. One of the things that differentiates humans from beasts is that we have at least some se…

I want to respond to your point about violin-playing, because I think it will open up an interesting discussion. Anecdotally, I was always motivated to practice my instruments by the same exploratory drive discussed in the article. I was taught to ask, "what if I did XXX this way?", i.e., what happens to my sound if I play long tones, what techniques do I need to play piece Y, how do I use scale Z to improvise?

Growing up, I found that those who ran on pure extrinsic factors with all discipline and no enjoyment either stopped or were stunted by locally optimal decisions. On the other hand, those who went on to study in university and play professionally seemed to derive the same obsessive enjoyment from their craft as I would a video game.

Do you think these data points further prove your point about emotional maturity? Or is there something more universal, that true success requires a fierce passion?

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#58

Post by asdff »

adamnemecek wrote: post #28
op03 wrote: post #7

Academia and Corporations. Academics are dealt with as we do kids i.e. they are protected and allowed to explore. Corporations exploit what has already been explored for reward - without the reward there is nothing protecting them.

Academia really doesn't let you explore.

Depends on your advisor.

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#59

Post by kzzzznot »

throwaway5792 wrote: post #54
dmead wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was right. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning#General_conce... The only person I've heard say "mastery" are Betsy devos (when she was getting grilled by warren at her senate confirmation) and some religious conservatives i know that homeschool their children. My general impression is that it's a marketing gimmick by carter schools that want to show they're somehow innovating in education. This is probab…

So what's wrong with it?

First I’ve heard of this, just copied a section from the linked Wikipedia page:

> The Chicago Mastery Learning Reading program was criticized for a focus on testing. A concern is that children were taught to pass tests without a focus on enduring skills. The duration of the retention of skills was questioned.

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#60

Post by stinos »

fxtentacle wrote: post #32

While the study classifies it as exploration and claims an intrinsic reward that will die out later in life, I would describe the behavior as novelty-seeking. I'd wager that for adults, a game on a screen is just not new enough. But if you'd give adult males a choice of which female to undress, I'm pretty sure they would value "exploration" very highly again. In a similar vain, when smartphones were new, the adult po…

But if you'd give adult males a choice of which female to undress, I'm pretty sure they would value "exploration" very highly again

Likely, but that's not the same experiment anymore since the sex factor comes into play and living beings are basically programmed to reproduce as much as possible and also with as much variety as possible (maybe oversimplified, but you get the point). So for a smartphone you can talk abut novelty-seeking/exploration (which btw I'm not sure are really different things), but when reproduction comes into play it's a whole different game anymore and it'll alter/override parts of the behavior and it shouldn't be underestimated how string the effectss can be.

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