Fix It Dr. James Is Interested in Knowing What Factors Best Motivate

Essay

Fix It
Dr. James is interested in knowing what factors best motivate children to perform well in school. He asks his friends to volunteer their children for the study and ends up with 23 children between the ages of 6 and 15 years. He randomly selects 12 children to participate in his first study in which he examines whether money is a good motivator. Half of the kids receive $5 for each A they earn on tests throughout the school year, whereas the other half receive no money. In a second study, Dr. James randomly assigns the students to one of three conditions. In the positive verbal reinforcement group the students' parents praise them for doing well by saying things like "great work" and "I knew you could do it!" In the punishment group students are assigned a menial chore, such as cleaning the house and raking leaves, when their grade on a test is below a B. In the control condition children are neither praised nor punished for their academic performance. Dr. James analyzes the data from the first study by conducting a one-way ANOVA. He concludes that kids who earn money for doing well end up having a higher GPA at the end of the semester than the kids who received no monetary incentive (F(9)=2.72, p > .05). Dr. James also conducts a one-way ANOVA on the second study. His analysis reveals the groups differ significantly (F(9) = 7.25, p < .05). After looking at how each group performs, he states that kids in the reinforcement group end up doing much better in school than the other two groups.
There are several flaws with Dr. James' design and analysis. Identify three and discuss how you would fix them.