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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

#151

Post by grasshopperpurp »

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.

This highlights our inability as a society to properly value things. Things like education, the environment, mental health, and just creating a place that does right by as many people as possible are improperly weighted. I'm not saying it's easy to put proper valuations on any of this, but it's easy to do a lot better than we - at least in the US - are.

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#152

Post by jdmichal »

jariel wrote: post #41
yellowapple wrote: post #29

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. I ain't vain enough to consider myself even "fairly intelligent", but I can say that I ain't very self-motivated, nor have I been since elementary school, and in hindsight my education system's insistence on strangling such intri…

Decent high school grades are not that hard to get. It's not 'strangulation' to have to take 'English, Geography, History and Math'. I wish I had paid more attention in English class, I did not respect how important it was going to be until later in life, for example. The course load in Eng. or in Grad School - now that can be overwhelming to the point of exhaustion.

The forced cadence of certain topics actually does have a part to play. Imagine if you could have skipped all those English classes back then. Guess what? You would be learning it all right now! Just like you're _re_learning it right now. Why? Because you now have intrinsic motivation to learn it. Having entirely skipped it, you might even have realized a lot sooner the actual need instead of limping along with whatever informational crutches you managed to walk away with. The fact that we leave little room to teach the need of a subject, and force feed it in a prescribed manner rather than allowing exploration, is all commingled together into the failure mode being discussed.

Allowing children to pick what they want to explore and modeling the education after exploration is part of the baseline for Montessori education.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_education

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#153

Post by whywhywhywhy »

yellowapple wrote: post #29
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…

> 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. I ain't vain enough to consider myself even "fairly intelligent", but I can say that I ain't very self-motivated, nor have I been since elementary school, and in hindsight my education system's insistence on strangling such intri…

> "Grades are all that matter, and mine ain't anywhere near good enough to go to a good college, so why bother trying?"

Or even worse when teachers decide it isn’t worth you trying because they failed to inspire you.

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#155

Post by jkhdigital »

bergstromm466 wrote: post #30

Has anyone heard of Sudbury Valley schools? Peter Hartkamp started one in the Netherlands, and wrote a book about it. “Our current education systems do not trust children to learn what they need to know. Governments believe that children must be coerced into learning what they prescribe as necessary for future life even though they do not and cannot know what that future will be like. Yet we do know that coercion pro…

Yes, and I’ve been fantasizing about sending my child to one since before he was born. Unfortunately I don’t live near any :-(

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#156

Post by jkhdigital »

Seems like further evidence that nature has developed an optimal algorithm for solving the multi-armed bandit problem as it manifests in the typical environment humans evolved in. Unlike the artificial games used by the researchers, there is no such thing as a fixed reward in nature—everything is subject to change unexpectedly. Children are wired with an algorithm that heavily favors exploration in light of the dynamic environment.

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#157

Post by betterunix2 »

aaron695 wrote: post #98
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…

> The schooling system, with its grades, signed slips, and whatnot, is set up through extrinsic motivation to teach obedience, conformity, and smothering the intrinsic drive so necessary for the creative work we will expect from the children later in life. We finish 50 million kids in school each year. 100's of millions have been through the US system alone over it's history. If this was simply true then I feel like…

Actually the modern concept of a school was developed to train people for industrial jobs, where they would have to follow instructions and a schedule set by their superiors -- hence the strict scheduling, the rank-and-file arrangement of classrooms, and so forth. Prior to the industrial revolution most children did not go to a formal schools, and would receive their education from parents and tutors, or by some other ad-hoc arrangements. In some parts of the world it was common for traveling teachers to board with a family for some time and educate the children.

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#158

Post by watwut »

kqr wrote: post #135
watwut wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So now, you are blaming another kid for failure to be perfect tutor where adult educated teacher failed too. And that good kid is supposed to study out tutoring methods from materials targeted at adults. Which is definitely not fun free exploration for that good kid. Which is why literally this whole setup where you have good students tutoring weak ones is a trap and punishment for the good one. Expecting well behave…

I think you'll find better discussions if you choose to attack the steel man version of someone's argument, rather than the straw man. Nowhere did I state I expected any expert tutors from children. I merely said that something, anything at all, is better than nothing. It might not even be better in all cases, but on average, the evidence tells us it is.

Literally in the comment I responded to, you expect student tutor to make the subject interesting. This is your description of what you expect: To fiendishly ask questions that are just out of reach of the students ability, or will reveal some tiny flaw in the students understanding. This type of thing engages everyone when done well.

Plus, this is your attitude toward kid tutoring another kid: as a tutor, you have exactly two jobs: Make the student interested. Improve the student's skills. And you have this expectation placed on a kid.

> I merely said that something, anything at all, is better than nothing.

That something is to put responsibility on a kid and then blame a kid for not tutoring well enough it it fails. And I am telling you that it is unfair to punish the good kid by doing this. Because this plan is not caring about the "good" kid at at all.

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#159

Post by lotsofpulp »

Chris2048 wrote: post #149
nickelpro wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but you're missing OP's point. They're saying that novelty is the fundamental drive behind the observed behavior, not some priority towards "exploration" that children have in greater abundance than adults. The children are seeking pleasure through novelty, and the researchers are interpreting that as exploration. The parent comment illustrates how silly that is, if you substitute something that still holds plea…

Given how many adults would board a ship to sail to faraway lands in the past before much was known about the "here be dragons" places, suggests adults still value exploration.

I am not aware of any good statistics about that, but my assumption is the line level travelers to faraway lands simply didn’t have better economic options.

As far as I understand, going out on ships to unknown places was an extremely risky venture with zero luxuries.

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#160

Post by agumonkey »

kqr wrote: post #10
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…

Then again, if one is more interested in practically applicable tips, the book How To Talk So Kids Will Listen... And Listen So Kids Will Talk is great too -- for all kinds of interpersonal relationships. It covers empathy (actually listening and confirming feelings) but is largely about how to enable extrinsic motivation, through encouraging autonomy, mastery, and purpose. One rather concrete example is that the aut…

I did teach a kid math and how subtle communication is when you're an adult.

sometimes they'll talk, then mutter to confusion then emit blips because they heard words coming from you, then all of a sudden they'll have a burst of excitement again.

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