Avoid Extrinsic Rewards
 

I am writing a series of posts about eight principles of education integrated into the design and activities of Hershey Children’s Garden and how you can use these principles with your little green thumbs.

Principle number four: let them discover. A number of child development and workplace researchers have suggested that rewards that come to us externally (a bonus, three stars on the board, "great job, dude") do not always motivate us to learn. Actually, children in one experiment exhibited worse performances when offered an external reward than when offered only the reward of completing a challenging problem. 

As we saw from my last post, kids naturally absorb information through the things that interest them. This is naturally tied to giving your kids some limited free choice as well.

Children who explore Hershey Children’s Garden discover many things for themselves. They learn how raspberries grow and when to pick them by seeing them growing and picking them when they are ripe. They discover what the layers of the earth’s crust are by opening doors, as in the picture above, to discover strange words like leaf litter, clay and bedrock. Nothing replaces the sheer fun of learning what floats and what does not by dropping stuff into the pond (highly discouraged by staff, of course).

So hold back on dangling the carrot and aid your children in seeing how fascinating the world is when we discover it for ourselves.

Posted by Josh Steffen

Tags: cleveland, Education, Hershey Children's Garden, Youth Gardening

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 6th, 2008 at 8:00 am and is filed under Josh Steffen, Youth Gardening. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.