Motivation for Education

Based on Dan Pink’s TED talk, a Victorian teacher has made some incisive comments about how students interface with their exams.

The basic summary is that money makes people do better on mechanical tasks, but far worse on creative tasks; Ziad Baroudi extends this to the classroom, where marks are the currency (more literal for some students than others) and students are, therefore, focused mechanically on what is required to do well on tests – rather than what is required to learn or to be creative.

Check out both the talk and Baroudi’s commentary on the Rambling Teacher blog.