“Children are more likely to do their homework if they see it as an investment, not a chore” is the first line in a report about a new University of Michigan study.

I already posted about this study and added the information to The Best Resources For Showing Students Why They Should Continue Their Academic Career. The Boston Globe reported on it a couple of months ago. But the study itself was just released. You can get more details about it here, but this is the quote I used from the Globe article describing the experiment:

Students whose career goals did not require education (e.g., sports star, movie star) spent less time on homework and got lower grades. The good news is that the researchers found it was easy to make education more salient, and thereby motivate kids. When students were shown a graph depicting the link between education and earnings, they were much more likely to hand in an extra-credit homework assignment the next day than if they were shown a graph depicting the earnings of superstars.