When
I have a question about teaching, I pay close attention to what my friends do,
especially those teachers that I respect a lot.
If a tactic works for them, then I should, at least, consider the
possibility. If a teacher is not
careful, it is easy to spend too much of your time giving out opinions and not
enough of your time taking in opinions (and evaluating them).
Or, as I might tell my children, keep your mouth shut and your ears open if you want to benefit from a conversation.
I have a close friend who is now retired who was a great teacher. He did an excellent job and the students loved him. He used to give out extra credit points for many types of assignments. “The cost is very little to give out a point or two and the students are just so much more likely to do what you want them to do.” I suspect that he would have asserted that students are human beings who tend to respond well to motivation. It seemed to work for him.
I had another close friend who was also a fabulous teacher. Unfortunately, he died a few years back. He got great results. However, he was adamant against giving extra credit points. “Why should I bribe students for helping them to learn college-level materials. If they are unwilling to do the work, they should suffer the consequences. If they don’t do what I assign, they won’t learn the material and they won’t do well in the course.”
Sadly, I see both points of view here and that leaves me in a quandary.
Here is why I am asking. I teach a very complex accounting course each semester. This is tough stuff for the students. So, I tend to give them advice over the summer about how to do well in the course. There are certain things they can do during these final 6 weeks before the first class that will get them ready to do well when the semester starts.
I teach accounting and, for those of you who don’t teach accounting, the financial accounting rules are gathered into thousands of pages called the Accounting Standards Codification (ASC). As with an attorney and the law, it is important for an accountant to be able to find things within this massive set of accounting rules. So, I created a 7-question “Scavenger Hunt.” I told the students what I wanted them to find in the ASC and how to locate it.
I thought this was something that they would enjoy doing and would really help them be ready for my class on August 22. They would know how to find things in the rules.
When I emailed this to the students, I went out of my way to tell them that this was purely for their benefit so I expected them to do it. However, I was not going to give them a few extra credit points. I wanted them to do it because it was good for them and not because they needed to be bribed. They are not 12 years old. They are on the verge of entering the adult working world.
I was pretty sure that if I offered them a mere one or two points on the first test many of them would do the work (it would only take 20-30 minutes) almost immediately. But, if I do that, am I creating students who must be bribed or they simply will not do anything even for their own benefit. Are students becoming like Pavlov’s dogs they can only react to a specific stimulus?
Well, nearly a week has passed since I emailed this assignment and I’ve heard from none of my 17 students. That leaves me wondering which of my two friends had the best approach to Extra Credit. I wondered what you might think.
