St. Louis public schools have been known to raffle off TVs and iPods for kids who just show up the first week, and private schools in the burbs dangle the occasional prize to get their students excited about studying hard or behaving well. What everybody really wants, of course, is kids who are internally motivated: who show up because it matters, learn for the sheer joy of it, and work hard because they know they’re capable. But schools argue that they often have to start with extrinsic rewards—tangible things like money and stuff—just to get the kids’ attention. Once the kids are motivated, teachers can begin to help them internalize that motivation.
“The fact is, they don’t,” sighs Marvin Berkowitz, the Sanford N. McDonnell Endowed Professor of Character Education at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. They just keep using extrinsic rewards, “because it’s easy, and you often see what appears to be immediate success. But students are really learning two things: Do more of what you were rewarded for, and do whatever you get rewarded for. And generally, we don’t want to breed people who are fixated on rewards. The business world is not thrilled with educators, because our grads are coming into the workplace wanting to get rewarded just for doing their jobs or just for coming to work every day.”
Christy Leming, the principal of Marian Middle School, credits a Super Soaker for her own epiphany. A young woman had arrived, like many students, with rough manners and no interest in learning. “We’d been listening to the experts, and we worked really hard on a rewards-based behavior-modification program,” Leming says. “She had two great weeks, and we gave her the water gun as a reward—and then it all fell apart. She started asking, ‘What are you giving me for it?’ Well, eventually they are going to stop making bigger Super Soakers. You just can’t have schools sounding like Let’s Make a Deal.”
Leming and her staff even rethought a contest to bring in cans for a food drive. “We said, ‘You know what? Let’s teach the stats about hunger and the value of service, and cut out the pizza party for the winner.’” When a student does well, there’s no cash or treat; instead, a teacher might slip a note into her locker or call her mother to tell her. “It’s not even ultimately about praise; it’s about helping kids see what they did to be successful,” Leming explains. “Now, we’re not beyond a little bit of extrinsic [motivation] for students who have never experienced success, who have just gotten sucked into a pattern of behavior. But we try to make it relational. One young woman, if she gets to where she needs to be on her behavioral chart, she and I play Sorry at lunch.”
Leming’s biggest motivator is showing kids they’re responsible—for their successes as well as their mistakes. “Poverty can make people think, and often accurately, ‘What I do doesn’t have a whole lot of impact on the outcome. I can do everything right and then the pieces fall apart, so why put a whole lot of effort into it?’ We try to get kids to see that a success wasn’t an accident: ‘You did this!’ We even have them predict, on the tests, what grade they think they’ll get and why, so they see that the grade is not a roll of the dice.”
Edward Deci, the Gowen Professor in the Social Sciences at the University of Rochester, pioneered this subject back in 1969, when psychologists believed it didn’t matter whether motivation was intrinsic or extrinsic; you just added it all together to get as much motivation as possible. Skeptical, Deci did his own research and found that it wasn’t simple addition at all: Using external rewards actually undermines people’s inherent interest in the activity, taking away internal motivation. Why? Because people pay more attention to the reward than to their enjoyment of the activity, and soon they no longer want to do the task unless they are rewarded.
Two Stanford University researchers tested Deci’s theory by rewarding one group of preschoolers for drawing with magic markers. Sure enough, in free-play settings afterward, those children spent less time drawing with the markers than the children who received no reward.
More studies followed—128 of them, by the time Deci did a meta-analysis in 1999. And even though many of the researchers had set out to disconfirm his thinking, the bulk of the evidence confirmed it.
Just last year, a study at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology randomly split toddlers into two groups. One group’s members were left alone; the others were rewarded whenever they engaged in an altruistic act.
The rewarded group became less altruistic.
So why, if we know this, are more and more schools paying students to learn? “Granted, the students they are paying are totally disaffected,” Deci says. In other words, you’re not lessening their motivation; they have none. “What’s important, to me, is that we’ve known for decades—way back to the rat studies—that yes, you can get behaviors using extrinsic reward, but the minute you stop the reward, the behavior stops too. So are you going to follow these students for the rest of their lives, paying them to learn?”
Some counter that, once the reward creates a spark, the students can become internally motivated. “Fat chance,” Deci retorts. “If you just spark people to do their jobs by paying them, they will become so interested in their job that they will continue to do it without pay? There is not any evidence that kids are getting sparked to learn.” Using extrinsic rewards is “desperate and lazy,” he concludes. Educators ought to be bolstering internal motivation instead.
But that’s harder.
“All human beings have three basic psychological needs: We need to feel a sense of competence, a sense of relatedness, and a sense of autonomy,” Deci says. For kids to feel internal motivation, they have to know that they’re capable, be in a safe and caring community, be engaged by the material, and have the freedom to make choices for themselves. If you try to control them with physical rewards, Deci warns, “they will become dependent on the reward and start to feel like a puppet.”
One of Berkowitz’s former students, Jennifer Dieken-Buchek, was teaching third grade at a school that had all sorts of extrinsic-reward programs. One promised an ice-cream party to the class that behaved best in the cafeteria. When the principal came to her classroom to present the award, an 8-year-old stood up in the back of the room and, confident he was speaking for everyone, said, “Thank you very much, but we don’t want the party.”
“Why not?” asked the principal, puzzled.
“Because we should do it because it’s right.”
