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.     

Maternal Perinatal and Concurrent Anxiety and Mental Health Problems in Early Childhood: A Sibling-Comparison Study

Do associations between maternal anxiety symptoms and offspring mental health remain after comparing differentially exposed siblings? Participants were 17,724 offspring siblings and 11,553 mothers from the Norwegian Mother and Child Cohort study. Mothers reported anxiety and depressive symptoms at 30 weeks’ gestation, and 0.5, 1.5, 3, and 5 years postpartum. Child internalizing and externalizing problems were assessed at ages 1.5, 3, and 5, and modeled using multilevel analyses with repeated measures nested within siblings, nested within mothers. Maternal pre- and postnatal anxiety were no longer associated with child internalizing or externalizing problems after adjusting for maternal depression and familial confounding. Maternal anxiety when the children were in preschool age, however, remained significantly associated with child internalizing but not externalizing problems.     

Applying constructivism: A test for the learner-as-scientist

Constructivist learning theory predicts that knowledge encoded from data by learners themselves will be more flexible, transferable, and useful than knowledge encoded for them by experts and transmitted to them by an instructor or other delivery agent. If this prediction is correct, then learners should be modeled as scientists and use the reasoning and technologies of scientists to construct their own knowledge. However, it cannot be taken for granted that the prediction is correct, or correct in every knowledge domain. The present study attempts to establish conditions in which the prediction can be operationalized and tested. It reports on the adaptation of constructivist principles to instructional design in a particular domain, second language vocabulary acquisition. Students learning English for academic purposes in the Sultanate of Oman followed one of two approaches to vocabulary expansion, learning pre-encoded dictionary definitions of words, or constructing definitions for themselves using an adapted version of the computational tools of lexicographers. After 12 weeks, both groups were equal in definitional knowledge of target words, but lexicography group students were more able to transfer their word knowledge to novel contexts.