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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

#111

Post by 082349872349872 »

brnt wrote: post #17

I guess I must have bever lost the child in me. I've been a fan of open world games, just so I can roam the world. I sometimes dont even play the storyline at all. I still don't like that Steam added 'achievements' that I can't turn off, I'll be in charge of what constitutes a goal thank you very much :) Another poster had an interesting observation about academia vs corporate work. I'm 33 and still in academia, and…

Growing old is required. Growing up is optional.

    I've got no strings so I have fun
    I'm not tied up to anyone
    They've got strings, but you can see
    There are no strings on me
Viewed as meta-game, school can be viewed as the child's exercise in learning where society attaches the strings, and how to acquire and retain slack in them. Where better to learn Bureaucracy-fu than in a bureaucracy?

A video about strings (both literal and metaphorical): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_CZTi8L29c

Compare a 1940 vision of catfishing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAykOz1gWi4

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#112

Post by kqr »

watwut wrote: post #83
kqr wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It sucks to be the kid who behaves well is punished by being a tutor for kid with issues the adults have hard time to motivate or deal with. The tutors is not improving own recall. The tutor is dealing with social problem outside of tutors control or abilities. And no, good student kid wont be able to individualize teaching better then adult teacher. The good student kid will struggle with the whole motivational thin…

> And no, good student kid wont be able to individualize teaching better then adult teacher.

That's not the alternative, either, because nobody will pay for one adult teacher per student. The alternative is no tutoring at all.

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#113

Post by kqr »

mhaberl wrote: post #79
smhg wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I think your expectations of the schooling system are simply skewed. At least in the countries which I lived in (Europe) the 'customer' of the schooling system is…

I agree with this. We all love to say that we want creative free thinking individuals.. but come on now - currently the society is mostly composed of conformed (without this society probably would not function, at least as it does now) and in a lesser extent the obedient. The creative and free thinking individuals push us all foward and we would not advance without them, but the majority is different. Schooling syste…

Actual, socially beneficial conformity is produced just fine on its own with how humans generally are social group animals that want to fit in and not be embarrassed from doing weird, unfair, or harmful stuff.

Simply interacting with other people is what makes humans follow meaningful rules. That happens whether or not we're rewarded for being good dogs in the eyes of adults.

Conformity to arbitrary procedures and sets of rules is not helpful anywhere, and that's what school gives us.

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#114

Post by tpxl »

andrei_says_ wrote: post #9
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…

Also Alfie Kohn’s Punished by Rewards, a thick tome dedicated to the research and reasons of how and why punishment and rewards don’t teach what’s intended and don’t motivate as intended... and how extrinsic motivation kills intrinsic motivation. Withdrawing rewards is punishment so both are really the same. Human beings are not designed to be trained like rats and birds, regardless of what many believe. If your kid…

>If your kid is good at something and you want them to lose interest, encourage or reward them for doing the thing :)

Genuine question: What do you do if you want them to get better then?

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#115

Post by adrianN »

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…

I don't like evolutionary arguments because society changes much faster than genetic adaption can keep up with. There was no industry making money off distracting people when our intrinsic motivation system was shaped.

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#116

Post by watwut »

kqr wrote: post #110
watwut wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As for tutoring itself: it increases the skill level of both the teacher and the student. As someone who was a kid in that position, no it did not increased my skill in thing I was supposed to teach at all. That might happen when you are teaching interested peer at similar level, does not happen when you are teaching someone uninterested and someone who has much lower skills. > For example, toddlers learn primarily…

It makes no sense to blame a bad outcome on the student being uninterested and of lower skill. As a tutor, you have exactly two jobs: 1. Make the student interested. 2. Improve the student's skills. Of course the student is uninterested and has low skills when you start out. Otherwise there wouldn't be much of a point to the activity. You might argue that it's not the tutor's job to make the student interested, but i…

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 behaved kid to be that emphatetic mind reading tutor is waaay beyond age appropriate expectations and abilities of typical kid.

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#118

Post by trombonechamp »

Monkeys do the same thing:

Many non-human animals show exploratory behaviors. It remains unclear whether any possess human-like curiosity. We previously proposed three criteria for applying the term curiosity to animal behavior: (1) the subject is willing to sacrifice reward to obtain information, (2) the information provides no immediate instrumental or strategic benefit, and (3) the amount the subject is willing to pay depends systematically on the amount of information available. In previous work on information-seeking in animals, information generally predicts upcoming rewards, and animals’ decisions may therefore be a byproduct of reinforcement processes. Here we get around this potential confound by taking advantage of macaques’ ability to reason counterfactually (that is, about outcomes that could have occurred had the subject chosen differently). Specifically, macaques sacrificed fluid reward to obtain information about counterfactual outcomes. Moreover, their willingness to pay scaled with the information (Shannon entropy) offered by the counterfactual option. These results demonstrate the existence of human-like curiosity in non-human primates according to our criteria, which circumvent several confounds associated with less stringent criteria.

Paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00100...

Non-paywalled version: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2018/03/29/291...

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#119

Post by circlefavshape »

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…

"How to talk so kids will listen ..." is a fantastic book, and I constantly recommend it to pretty much everyone.

The fake choice thing, though, never EVER worked with my kids.

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#120

Post by jiggunjer »

renewiltord wrote: post #82
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #2

One thing neither this article nor the linked study measure is if there is a difference in this behavior between boys and girls. I looked through the actual article to see if there was a statement that said if there was a statistical difference between the two or not, but although they do specify the numbers for the genders of the participants in the study, none of the analysis does any comparison between the genders…

They weren't testing that hypothesis, so that's why they didn't do this. If you go back and torture the data like this, you'll get acne from green jellybeans.

Not if you correct for multiple comparisons.
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