The Homework Conundrum

How do we get more willing volunteers to complete it?

MindsetsSome students are in a fixed mindset:

• they will not complete h/w

• they believe they are incapable of reaching the next level

• they are not willing to take the risks or do the work to move them forward

• they lack confidence in your subject area

• they think that other students are clever and they are not.

What’s your best strategy for getting most students to

complete h/w?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lR06-RP3n0Q&noredirect=1

Would the following clip make you more or less likely to pollute the en-

vironment?

My morale-boosting yr11 mantras:

• You are not really upping your game here.(I’m not going to up my game.)

• Please don’t forget that your homework is due in on Monday.

(I’ll forget about this.)

• If you don’t do this you will miss out on the best grades.

(I will not get the next grades.)

• Get the work done now, don’t wait until the last minute.

(I’ll wait until the last minute.)

• Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten your books or that you had no time to get it finished

(I will forget my book, I will have no time.)

“Your heritage is being vandalized every day by theft losses of petrified wood of 14 tons a year, mostly a small piece at a time."

Psychologist Robert B. Cialdini about creating social norms through the way we communicate.

Crafting Normative Messages to Protect the Environment

When we are trying to establish behavioural norms in groups of people, it can often “backfire to produce the opposite of what a communicator intends.”

There is an understandable, but misguided, tendency to try to mobilize action against a problem by depicting it as regrettably frequent.

Information campaigns emphasize that alcohol and drug use is intolerably high, that adolescent suicide rates are alarming, and—most relevant to this article—that rampant polluters are spoiling the environment.

Within the statement “Many people are doing this undesirable thing” lurks the powerful and undercutting normative message…

“Many people are doing this.”

They displayed the sign, 

“Many past visitors have removed petrified wood from the Park, changing the natural state of the Petrified Forest”

(With this was an image of three visitors taking wood)

The percentage of wood stolen over a 5 week period was 7.92%.

In contrast, when the sign they displayed read, 

“Please don’t remove the petrified wood from the Park, in order to preserve the natural state of the Petrified Forest”

(accompanied by an image of a lone visitor stealing wood with a red circle and bar superimposed over the top)

Only 1.67% of the wood was stolen.

DESCRIPTIVE / INJUNCTIVE NORMS

Injunctive norms (involving perceptions of which behaviors are typically approved or disapproved)

Descriptive norms (involving perceptions of which behaviors are typically performed).

Much research indicates that both kinds of norms motivate human action; people tend to do what is socially approved as well as what is popular.

Results grid…

What do I now say to create more positive, descriptive

norms?

• Everybody in the class has now emailed me their first draft.

• I got 16 updated drafts mailed to me over the weekend.

• I can’t believe that so many of you completed the next question too.

• Look how well you are doing in the lesson because you all made a start on this at home.

• I’m just waiting for three more pieces of h/w. Thank you for explaining to me why I will get them tomorrow.

Everybody is doing it therefore I want to be

part of it.