by V. Kumar

Created on: June 30, 2007

Education experts call it 'peer wages'. The students who are brilliant, exert an important influence on the learning of their colleagues, and actually contribute to their learning. Apart from providing an immediate incentive to those who had the requisite potential, cash rewards for high grades and test scores, will indirectly promote excellence, and remunerate those students for such peer wages.

Actually, the merit scholarships awarded to such students are, in theory, somewhat similar to the cash rewards we are discussing here. But the main difference between scholarships and cash rewards, is that the former is related more with need for supporting the next level of educational expenditure, whereas the rewards take away the concept of need. Because of this very difference, the 'rewards' are a much more powerful tool, when it comes to their motivational effects as an incentive.

Another reason why cash rewards may be better than merit scholarships, is because the scholarships, are much bigger in amount, and hence can be allowed to far lesser number of candidates. The cash rewards on the other hands can be smaller and thus distributed to a far bigger group, thereby allowing many more bright talented students to get motivated from them.

There are some who disagree. One of the arguments put forward is that it takes away the joy of learning and replaces it with a very different kind of mechanical learning that may not be the best habit in the long run. Associating learning with immediate reward, may nor always work - to that extent, there is some logic in what they say, but what they ignore is that learning due to some immediate incentive, actually prepares a child to learn more and paves the way for additional learning. Simply put, once you are halfway through, for whatever reason, you may very well prefer to complete the whole job. Thus a child, who for the sake of reward, has already covered part of the syllabus, will find the rest too easy to ignore.

In today's world, market and management are all about creating right incentives. Proper incentives can change every person's behavior and it would be naive, if we do not make use of them in the field of education and human resource building for the next generation.

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