Learning On The Job

Daniel Pink on incentives and performance:

Some highlights:

As long as the task required only mechanical skill, bonuses worked as they would be expected: the higher the pay, the better the performance.

But once the tasked called for even rudimentary cognitive skill, a larger reward led to poorer performance.

To provide intrinsic motivation, you need to provide:

• Autonomy
• Mastery
• Purpose

There is a mismatch between what science knows and what [education] does. Those 20th century rewards, those motivators that we think are a natural part of [education], do work but only in a surprisingly narrow band of circumstances.