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MrShaggy comments on The Wire versus Evolutionary Psychology - Less Wrong
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The lecturer in our Numerical cognition course told us of a result that went along the following lines. A schoolteacher was trying to teach his students to do basic arithmetic, and seeing them get the calculations wrong time after time. Then one day he decided to follow them out into town, where he saw that some of his students handled arithmetic just fine when they were doing grocery shopping, or working part-time selling things. Inspired, he returned to class and reworded his assignments to be about shopping, and guess what happened? The students failed just as miserably as they had before. The cognitive context was just too dissimiliar to the environment where they'd picked up the practice.
I got the impression that this wasn't just an isolated anecdote, but had also been replicated in more controlled studies. The reference he gave is to Jean Lave's Cognition in Practice - I have a copy of the book from the university library, but haven't had the time to read further yet. I'll see if I can skim it through this evening to find the part he was talking about.
This example helps clarify something for me. I don't think it's that the "cognitive context was...too dissimilar" for the students, I would guess that it's that they don't care in class. When they're doing they're job or shopping, they do care. But the obvious reply is: why do I hypothesize that cheating-examples make people care in a fictional context? Maybe someone can help say it clearly for me, but it just makes sense to me that math requires a higher threshold of "caring" than something like "cheating." If I were reading a novel about a kid solving math problems in class, I'd probably wouldn't care about the math problems, but if I were reading a novel and cheating was possible, it probably would cause a reaction. This is what I was trying to get at with testing "various types of emotionally-motivating things," it just seems obvious that some things will evoke emotions in some contexts but not others, and some emotional responses will increase performance or some won't, but I can't put it better than that right now.