For Teachers: An Important Paper on Rewards and Motivation
If you ask a teacher about the virtues of giving students rewards for behavior, effort, or accomplishment, there is a very good chance that he will tell you about the dangers of “extrinsic motivators”. Specifically, he me may tell you that giving students rewards for doing something will undermine their “intrinsic” motivation to continue doing that thing in the future, once the reward is no longer offered.
This is an element of folk psychology among educators, but it’s not entirely without justification. Any good (especially progressive) school of education will show its teachers-in-training any number of studies that demonstrate just that danger of rewards. Certainly, my credentialing program did.
As many of my classmates were quick to point out, however, many of those studies seem to have limitations that call their external validity into question. The studies tend to look only at certain kinds of rewards, for example, and tend to involve incentivizing tasks that students are already motivated to perform. Real-world classrooms, we noted, have the potential to include a wide variety of rewards for students and often involve tasks that students do not find very interesting, at least initially.
Still, I had never really managed to find an analysis that called the conventional
