Rewards can reinforce and at the same time forestall young children's willingness to learn. However, they are broadly used in the field of education, especially in early years settings, to stimulate children towards learning activities. This paper reviews the theoretical and research literature related to intrinsic and extrinsic motivational…

This is the second in a series of six papers from the Center on Education Policy exploring issues related to students' motivation to learn. As noted in the first paper of this series, motivation to learn is one of the most important factors in a student's educational journey, but a robust discussion about students' motivation may be the "missing…

This dual language manual, written in both Spanish and English, will help the teacher in a Behavior Analysis classroom utilize the Token System to motivate, reinforce, and foster independence in pupils' learning activities. The rationale and procedures for earning, giving, and exchanging tokens is clearly explained. The use of helpful accessories…

The author examines the two sets of conditions associated with human motivation: internal conditions and the outer demands. These demands are then discussed according to interrelationships among them along with some notions about how motives change. (Author)

Recent studies have demonstrated that external rewards can affect intrinsic motivation to perform an activity. Money tends to decrease intrinsic motivation, whereas positive verbal reinforcements tend to increase intrinsic motivation. This paper presents evidence that negative feedback and threats of punishment also decrease intrinsic motivation.…

Describes efforts in the banking industry to combine the reward elements of incentive programs with training activities. Concludes that incentive programs can be combined effectively with learning activities so that training is reinforced and learned behavior is also practiced. (WL)

Taking children off reinforcement programs apparently does not have the detrimental effects that many believe it to have. In this study, students who had been removed from a reinforcement program two years earlier made significantly greater gains in reading achievement than students who had not been involved in any reinforcement program.…

In a Behavior Analysis classroom the first step is to define instructional objectives for academic or social skills. The second step is to determine how much the child already knows about what is to be taught. An Entry Behavior Inventory and diagnostic tests help teachers decide where each child needs to begin working in the sequence leading to…

Condensed from "Phi Delta Kappan," Volume 50 (December 1968), 228-30.

This manual for classroom teachers is designed to teach the application of contingency contracting procedures in the typical instructional setting. A "contingency contract" is an agreement between teacher and student whereby the student, upon demonstration of specific task achievement, receives a reward: permission to participate in a "reinforcing…

In order to clarify the conditions under which material rewards have a detrimental effect upon children's later interest in the rewarded task, the effect of a reward for drawing was measured with 24 preschool children ranging in age from 34 to 40 months. The children were grouped as high or low in initial interest on the basis of observation of…

In order to investigate the effect of reinforcement on learning, 21 disadvantaged black children, 4 to 5 years of age, were divided among three treatment groups. Group I children received only feedback (information) as to the correctness or incorrectness of their responses. Group II children received a raisin for each correct response, and group…

Praise and criticism data were collected during a two-year correlational study of a selected sample of second- and third-grade teachers chosen for their consistency in producing student learning gains averaged over four years, and these data were analyzed to determine the effect that praise, criticism, rewards, and punishment had on learning…