44.04.01 Педагогическое образование

37.04.01 Психология

ЗАДАНИЕ. Прочитайте текст. Выполните послетекстовые задания.

Text. Dollars for Scholars: Should Parents and Children Be Paid for Doing the Right Thing

It’s one of the basic rules of parenting: Good fathers and mothers are supposed to be involved in their children’s lives and watch out for their best interests. Yet some parents don’t do this as much as they should. Perhaps these behaviors were never modeled by their own parents, or perhaps they are overwhelmed by the stressors in their lives. But for whatever reason, they don’t do such things for their children as taking them to the dentist, getting them a library card, or attending parent-teacher conferences.

To deal with the problem, a privately funded program in New York city (NYC) called Opportunity NYC is testing a highly controversial solution for getting low-income parents more involved in their children’s health and education: It pays them to do it. For instance, the program pays parents $200 for each child who receives an annual medical checkup. It pays $50 every two months for each child who attends school regularly during that period. It even makes some payments to the children themselves if they are in high school, and, for instance, they take precollege standardized tests or accumulate sufficient credits toward graduation.

Opportunity NYC has the goal of lessening economic hardship in low-income families through these direct payments and encouraging families to take the initiative to invest in their children and to improve their futures. This seems noble enough – families get money they very much need, but only if they engage in certain behaviors to advance the health and education of their children. In operant conditioning terms, the payment is a positive reinforcement. In principle, the beneficial behaviors should become well learned (Opportunity NYC.org, 2009).

So what objections could people have to such a program? For one thing, it has been criticized as insulting and patronizing to low-income parents. But also, whether such a program would work to change behavior for the better over the long term is an open question. People might be motivated by the rewards to learn to engage in the appropriate behaviors, but it’s unclear that those behaviors would persist without the rewards. Furthermore, some critics believe it may undermine students’ natural enjoyment of learning; instead, they will focus on the financial rewards (Kelley, 2007; Sebire, Standage, & Vansteenkiste, 2009; Vansteenkiste et al., 2005).

Opportunity NYC intentionally takes advantage of operant conditioning principles in an attempt to change people’s behavior for the greater social good. If it works as intended, it will help relieve the financial strains of poverty-stricken families, and it will have coaxed those parents into giving their children better futures than they might otherwise have had. Still, the idea of paying people to be socially responsible and meet their parental obligations strikes many people as the wrong approach to take, and it remains to be seen whether the program is effective.

Retrieved from Understanding Psychology (10-th ed.) by Robert S. Feldman, Glencoe/Mcgraw‑Hill; 2011, P. 188

Послетекстовые задания.

1. Give adequate Russian equivalents of the italicized worlds in the text.

2. Find 10 words with prefixes. Give their Russian equivalents.

3. Translate the sentences of the bold type into Russian.

4. Make up a summary of the text in three-four sentences in English.

5. Add more ideas to the list.

a) Do you believe that rewarding students financially for doing well in school reduces their motivation to learn for learning’s sake? Why or why not?

b) How might you determine whether Opportunity NYC is an effective program?

Write down your opinion on the paper in three-four sentences in English.

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