Contributed photo
Ms. Colon's 2nd grade classroom, which took home the John C. Daniels first place March Madness prize last year.
It’s game on for New Haven students: They’re about to embark on citywide school-versus-school contests — not over basketball or soccer, but attendance and reading.
On the heels of a K‑5 math competition that resembled a “championship basketball game,” the school district is going all in on a strategy to build student motivation: Gamifying learning and attendance goals with incentives and contests.
Superintendent Madeline Negrón unveiled that strategy at Monday evening’s Board of Education meeting.
She heard back anecdotal evidence from colleagues that kids are very serious about winning — and, as a result, they’re doubling down on learning.
So New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) is launching several contests this spring, including attendance and reading challenges, prompting school-versus-school competitions and promising books, tablets, and DJ parties as possible rewards.
In an upcoming “Attendance Challenge,” schools will face off against one another in brackets for the most improved attendance, with rival high schools Wilbur Cross and Hillhouse competing against one another in a separate “Attendance Bowl.”
Meanwhile, individual students with at least a 91 percent attendance record can enter a raffle for Amazon Echo and Firestick devices, among other prizes.
And in a spring “Reading Challenge,” elementary and middle school students who log the most time reading across the district can attend a breakfast with the superintendent and famed children’s book character Clifford the Big Red Dog, while school-specific incentives include coveted “extra recess” and “no-homework passes.” High schoolers who post about what they’re reading on social media can enter a raffle for books and “literacy swag.”
In short: “Lots of incentives,” said Negrón at Monday’s meeting.
The contests are the latest effort in NHPS to address chronic absenteeism and lower levels of academic proficiency, which worsened after a year of remote learning and socioeconomic challenges during the pandemic.
Research has so far drawn mixed conclusions on the effectiveness of these kinds of contests.
Critics of attendance and performance incentives have pointed out that students who are chronically ill, housing insecure, or experiencing other challenges at home face more barriers to school attendance, and are therefore more likely to be left out of these rewards. (Addressing those underlying roots of absenteeism has also been part of NHPS’ attendance strategy, which includes a Dropout Prevention Team and partnering organizations that visit students’ homes and connect them with social services.)
In New Haven, competitions to boost student engagement have had some success.
Last school year, John C. Daniels elementary and middle school tested out a series of classroom vs. classroom contests to boost student attendance. That year, the school more than halved its chronic absenteeism rate, which dropped from 54 percent to 25 percent.
Daniels Principal Yesenia Perez said at the time that the competition not only boosted attendance but cultivated a culture of collaboration, school spirit, and belonging as students worked to reach a common goal. She said that kids would encourage one another to show up to school because of the contest, cheering on chronically-absent peers with comments like “I’m so glad you’re here.”
As a whole, the district has seen substantial improvement in student attendance: Chronic absenteeism rates dropped from 47.6 percent in November 2022 to 32.9 percent in November 2023.
Board of Education members offered anecdotal evidence that contests are indeed encouraging students.
Offering a “data point of one,” Mayor Justin Elicker reported that his daughter, a student at FAME School, came home last week determined to make headway in the “iReady” learning program so that her school could beat out the competition.
“We are challenging Nathan Hale,” she had explained.
Meanwhile, Ed Joyner and Andrea Downer described a recent K‑5 “Math Facts Bee” competition they attended (which happened to be spearheaded by Joyner’s daughter, Monica Joyner).
“If you didn’t know any better, you’d think you were at a championship basketball game,” Joyner said, describing the level of cheer and enthusiasm from a crowd of parents and families.
One kid, Joyner described, “was so engaged that he made the sign of the cross before answering his question. And he got it right — so I don’t know if that was divine intervention.”
Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum Keisha Redd-Hannans said that after the success of the Math Bee, “I issued a challenge to my other department heads to create similar challenges.”
I applaud efforts to increase attendance in schools, as well as efforts to increase learning. I think it's important to always be trying new things in schools, especially when what you're doing isn't working as well as you want it to work. I think it's important to parse the points made in this article into two parts: one about attendance and one about learning. From what I know of the research, external incentives like prizes, money, praise, competition, etc. have been shown to correlate well with increasing performance in low-level cognitive tasks. Examples include assembly line work, basic arithmetic facts or operations, or anything where an algorithm is involved (i.e. follow the steps and achieve the result). Where extrinsic motivators historically perform very poorly is in creating better outcomes when creativity or higher order thinking is involved. Lepper et al, for example, found that "Extrinsic motivation showed few differences across grade levels and proved negatively correlated with academic outcomes." In other words, the more students are rewarded, the less well they tend to do in the long run on the cognitive tasks for which they are being rewarded. While short term progress is sometimes initially achieved, the learning behaviors overwhelmingly cease once the external motivators are removed.
I won't belabor the listing of evidence, but if you are interested, look for work by Daniel Pink, Alfie Kohn or Fred M. Newman, for example, who have all collated and performed extensive research in the area. In short, I hope that the initiative brings kids into schools, because obviously it all starts there. I do worry, however, that on the learning side of things, the extrinsic motivation/competition idea will have the opposite of the desired effect on learning, as well-intentioned as it may be. If we want to produce lifelong learners, readers and thinkers, then better engaging students with meaningful work may be the more productive route to pursue.