The Bamboo Project Blog: Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose
Interesting ideas about intrinsic motivation for both managers and instructional designers. Rather than rewards, instructional design should focus on motivating learners through autonomy, mastery, & performance.
<p>Rewards actually impede our problem-solving ability because they cause us to restrict our consideration of other ideas and to focus on only one or two ways to solve the problem. As one of the studies Dan references discovered,<strong> "once the task called for even<span style="text-decoration: underline;"> rudimentary cognitive skill</span>, <em>(my emphasis)</em> a larger reward led to poorer performance." </strong></p><p><strong><span style="font-size: 15px; font-family: Arial;">In a nutshell, rewards work for tasks where you don't have to think. As soon as you have to engage in any kind of thinking, rewards STOP WORKING. </span></strong></p>