Punished by Rewards? A Behavioral Perspective

The other articles in this special issue of PIQ deal directly with HPT and its practice. This set of articles does not. It does deal with the relationship between intrinsic motivation and external incentives–questions critical to the practice of HPT. The articles provide reaction to Alfie Kohn's latest book, Punished by Rewards, which ignited something of a firestorm. His article in the Harvard-Business Review, excerpted from the book (Kohn, 1993a) elicited printed responses ranging from reasoned rejoinders to accusations of preaching a brand of communism (Kohn. 1993b). Obviously, right or wrong, he has struck a forest of raw nerves. This set of articles attempts to use Kohn's work as a springboard for exploring the topic of rewards and punishments. It begins with a short review of the book; the review concentrates mostly on Kohn's arguments as they concern the workplace and ignores the large amount of the book devoted to child rearing and schools. The review is followed by two assessments of Kohn's work from the point of view of organizational behavior analysis. They are by Tom Mawhinney of the University of Detroit, Mercy, and Alyce Dickinson of Western Michigan University. Then Richard Pearlstein. the immediate past Vice-President for Research and Development of NSPI, concludes the series by relating the discussion specifically to the way managers actually manage. Our goal in this endeavor is to help lay bare some basic issues underlying human performance in the workplace. We hope you find it useful.     

Do we need norms of fitness for children with autistic spectrum condition?

The increasingly sedentary habits of children, and rising obesity levels, are prompting concern for children's future health. Children with autistic spectrum condition (ASC) show a clear trend in this regard. Within school, an understanding of how an individual's fitness compares to age norms is important in order to design appropriate exercise programmes. This study, by Maurice Place, Kathleen Dickinson and Joanna Reynolds, all based at Northumbria University, assessed 100 children with ASC and learning difficulty, and found a wide variation in fitness levels as measured by the Eurofit tests. In addition the measure of cardio‐pulmonary fitness (VO_{2 max}) was generally poor. In boys, body mass index (BMI) showed only a modest correlation with this measure of cardio‐pulmonary fitness, with the results for the girls not being significant. Using a variant of the established BMI calculation did not improve the correlation. To our knowledge this article offers the first set of published Eurofit test results for children with ASC and highlights the generally poor level of cardio‐pulmonary fitness in this group of children.     

Relation between language experiences in preschool classrooms and children's kindergarten and fourth-grade language and reading abilities

Indirect effects of preschool classroom indexes of teacher talk were tested on fourth-grade outcomes for 57 students from low-income families in a longitudinal study of classroom and home influences on reading. Detailed observations and audiotaped teacher and child language data were coded to measure content and quantity of verbal interactions in preschool classrooms. Preschool teachers' use of sophisticated vocabulary during free play predicted fourth-grade reading comprehension and word recognition (mean age=9; 7), with effects mediated by kindergarten child language measures (mean age=5; 6). In large group preschool settings, teachers' attention-getting utterances were directly related to later comprehension. Preschool teachers' correcting utterances and analytic talk about books, and early support in the home for literacy predicted fourth-grade vocabulary, as mediated by kindergarten receptive vocabulary.     

Spaces of Remembering and Forgetting: The Reverent Eye/I at the Plains Indian Museum An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 2002 convention of the Western States Communication Association.

Museums, memorials, and other historic places are key sites in the construction of collective memory and national identity. The Plains Indian Museum in Cody, Wyoming is one such space of memory where the (pre)history of “America” and its native peoples is told. Based on the view of texts as experiential landscapes, it is argued that this museum works to absolve Anglo-visitors of the social guilt regarding Western conquest through a rhetoric of reverence. This rhetorical mode invites visitors to adopt a respectful, but distanced observational gaze. A concluding section assesses the social and political consequences of memorializing in this mode.     

Do you like dogs or writing? Identity performance in childen's digital message exchange

Over a number of years we have been investigating ways in which e‐communication can contribute to children's writing development and how new technology re‐frames our understandings of writing in the classroom (Merchant, 2003; Burnett et al, 2004; Burnett et al, 2005; Merchant, 2005). Here we analyse the digital writing of pupils from two linked primary school classes (Year 3–5) in the North of England. Part of the project involved the pupils in communicating about themselves and their interests to email partners of the same age. In this article, we track children's identity performance in informal message exchange and show how this contributed to a final knowledge product. We explore how work that had its origins in representing children's lives and identities reflected their position in wider cultural worlds. This perspective causes us to question whether there are there sufficient opportunities for pupils to explore and express ‘who they are’ in the current content‐driven curriculum where public genres are central and personal voice is peripheral.