Effects of Reward and Punishment on Student Motivation

If students are rewarded for quality schoolwork, grades may initially improve. They may show more excitement. However, in the article “Why You Shouldn’t Pay Children for Grades” by Amy Mccready, it is found that the enhanced grades deteriorate along with the excitement for the payment. Most children simply lose interest in the reward. It is better to just let youth accomplish

The reason is that the reward is not the main thing that is backing up the action; but something else that could be self-develop, peace, etc. An example is a boy does his homework just because he was told by his parents to do his homework. Based on that the boy believes that his parents know what is best for him to do.

Pink provides a well laid out case highlighting the gap between what science knows and what organizations do. Showcasing the mid-century work of Harry Harlow and Edward Deci , Pink explains how human motivation seems to run counter to what most scientists and citizens believe. For decades, we have believed that we know what motivates people: rewards. Rewards are supposed to intensify interest and enhance performance. But Harlow and Deci found different results. Deci wrote, “When money is used as an external reward for some activity, the subjects lose intrinsic interest for the activity.” Like a shot of espresso, rewards can give you a jolt of energy, but the boost wears out, moreover, it can erode a person’s longer-term motivation to engage in the task. As we continue to incentivize our staff and students,

Motivating students with money has reached Washington DC area from their effort. The author thinks maybe it's not so bad getting paid for good grades. He thinks it doesn't hurt to try new things. He stated about his daughter getting paid for good grades and she started doing better. But , that's not the only thing they want to do with the money of portraying students to do better. They also want to use it to train teachers and give students more time to learn. I intend to also use this source to help formulate my arguments about if students should be paid for good

An incentive may be to be respected by your peers. This is localized to those contemporaneous to yourself, within your own class of fellow students. You are being judged in academic honors, the amount of effort you are seen putting into your academics, and the car you park on campus. There is the drive to take extravagant trips for Spring Break to Cancun and rack up massive debt on a credit card; all of this to live up to the Joneses.

Motivation is an important aspect of everyday life. "Researchers have consistently found that an approach based on extrinsic rewards and consequences actually reduces children's intrinsic motivation to learn" (Solley). Motivation is lost due to the pressure

In a classroom setting, it may be clear that most students are more extrinsically motivated to undertake their academic work, even though for some, it could be inherent extrinsic motivation, an example being, a student who understands that studying hard and doing assignments has a bigger reward in the long-term, as they will pass exams and attain good grades. In the same class could be another student who does assignments to avoid sanctions by teachers or parents (Lepper, Corpus and Iyengar, 2005). Both of these examples showcase students who are extrinsically motivated to study even though one appears to be more inherently thoughtful of their own benefit, while the other is doing it just to avoid punishment and is more dependent on the teacher’s or parent’s reaction. Children mostly do things that are

While watching “The Puzzle of Motivation” by Dan Pink, I was very intrigued. Throughout the entire talk, there were several interesting points that were made. It really interested me when Pink talked about the group that was rewarded. Pink stated that if the contestants were in the top 25% of the fastest times, they would be rewarded five dollars. With this incentive, most would hope to do well, if not better than the person that would not be rewarded. Pink then goes on to point out the results. How much faster did the group that was offered a reward actually do? On average, it took them three and a half minutes longer. This really stood out to me because when offered a reward for a task, normally a person would be more motivated and thus do better. What amazed me even more was that this isn’t just a one time thing. This is has been replicated over and over for nearly 40 years. As Pink says around 04:33, “These contingent motivators -- if you do this, then you get that -- work in some circumstances. But for a lot of tasks, they actually either don 't work or, often, they do harm.” These rewards that are being offered are being used to attempt to sharpen thinking and accelerate creativity, but instead it’s proving to do the opposite. It’s proving to dull thinking and block creativity.

If students receive payment for attendance and performance it could potentially affect them later on. If a child were to have rewards all through elementary and middle school, it could change the way they view their future. Once the child gets to a higher education level, they m ay find they are no longer offered the same rewards and incentives. It could then make them have to learn a new way of motivation late in the game. If a child has the idea that doing well in school is important for the future and not for rewards, they may do better later

The fundamental aim of motivation within an educational environment is to essentially make certain that their students are continuously encouraged in order for them to complete any task effectively. The core significance of student motivational approaches is to aid an educator in boosting up student morale. An additional role of motivation is to ensure that even when students are facing a difficult time outside of school they are always encouraged to

Richard Curwin also defines rewards as a way of manipulation, due to the pre-determined destination. He says “Rewards typically offered before requesting results”. On the other hand appreciation is always given after a student’s behavior, we don’t expect that they repeat their actions, but we wouldn’t mind if they do.

Eric Bettinger from Stanford University says that so much of our society nowadays are based on incentives and it became important to accomplish our goals. It has been proved that getting an award motivates them to do better and makes a purpose to achieve something. For example, on the Texas Advanced Placement program, students that took AP tests increased their grades steadily when compared to schools not providing cash. Also when students go through the process of getting better grades, without a doubt, they can learn more about what they have studied for the

The author’s assumption is that students’ behaviors can be determined by teacher’s behaviors; teachers make use of operant conditioning with rewarding system to build up students’ appropriate behaviors3. The experiment done by Becker had three options to change students’ behaviors: 1. Reward appropriate behavior and withdraw rewards if a student does inappropriate behavior. 2. Strengthen the rewards if 1 fails.

4 and Fig. 5 show the drop in total* motivation and types of motivation across marks achieved in the mid-year exams respectively. Fig. 4 shows a strong correlation to a linear regression line with an R2 value of 0.998. This would suggest that motivation has some impact on the process of learning. Fig. 5 shows the same as Fig. 4 except it is divided into both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation fits a linear regression model to a higher degree than extrinsic motivation, 0.92 to 0.82 respectively. This would suggest that there is more of a correlation between intrinsic motivation and academic learning than extrinsic motivation, however both appear to have some influence on the process of learning. This would suggest that intrinsic motivation has a larger impact on learning than being rewarded extrinsically through means of reinforcement and punishment. However there still appears to be an impact of extrinsic methods of motivation. This suggests that academic learning would be more effective when the person is intrinsically motivated in the learning

A reward is a high extrinsic motivator. The reward can be monetary, gift certificate, day off with pay, a two hour lunch, or working for two hours on anything but work. All entice performance and competition in the workplace. A gold star, being the teacher’s helper for a day, no daily