3 Reasons why rewards systems just don’t work in schools!

by Courtney Luce

When my youngest daughter was in kindergarten, we had an interesting situation happen at home that led me to look into reward models in education. She went to a school where they used a token system for the students who displayed “good” behavior. She loved the tokens! For every five she collected, she could pick out some type of future trash from the prize bin, and my child to this day LOVES future trash. Picking up pieces of paper off the floor in the kindergarten room was an easy way to receive these tokens, and she was a champ at picking up paper. Then, one day, a few months into kindergarten, I asked her to pick up her toys from the floor in her bedroom. Her response was shocking: “What will I get for it?” I looked at my adorable little toothless six-year old and said with a bit of vitriol, “You get to keep living here.”

Perhaps my reaction was a bit harsh, but I was wholly taken aback. In our house, there are family contributions; we all help because we all live here. This should be the case at school as well. If I drop paper on the floor, I should be taught that it is important to pick it up because we all exist in community together. I should not be taught that I should pick it up because I get a reward for doing so. I spend a lot of time in different schools observing pre-service teachers, and most schools have reward systems. There are behavior charts and tickets and tokens and classroom coupons. Some people use classroom Dojo and on Pinterest there are hundreds of pins for classroom/school-based reward systems.

There are other things I have noticed as well. For instance, the same kids always received the rewards. Anecdotally, this told me that rewards aren’t really changing behavior. I also noticed that over time kids seemed less interested in the rewards, so they quit doing the tasks. So I decided to research the effectiveness of these systems, and here is what I have learned:

1) Rewards diminish values. So there may be some confirmation bias here because this is what i expected based on what I saw from my own child; however there is quite a bit of research to back this up. Research shows that when kids are given rewards for behavior they do not see that behavior as an expectation. This becomes an issue, for instance, when kids receive rewards for what should be general expectations of behavior and work. Schools may give tokens or rewards for things like cleaning up trash on the floor in the hall, cleaning up your own work space, reading, working hard on an assignment, etc. Please, tell me you read this and went, “Whoa, that does seem ridiculous!” However, if you didn’t, that’s okay too. Our education system has operated with the belief that rewards help for a very long time. Here is why this is problematic.

In motivation theory, when we reward people for expected behavior, intrinsic motivation diminishes (our own internal motivation system) because there is now an external motivator (something outside of ourselves). I totally understand why these became popular. The goal is that educators want to see more of these behaviors and believe that by rewarding this is what will happen. It’s nice when a child picks up trash in the hall without being asked. However, a simple “thank you for taking care of our community” can be a way better future motivator than a token, and reminder that the student is a part of the community as well. The child picking up trash in the hall initially did it because it felt like the “right thing to do.” If we assign a reward, next time he might pick it up for the reward. If he continues to pick it up and the reward stops coming (or becomes boring), he may stop picking up trash altogether. The value of the “right thing to do” was replaced by the reward. “I want my students to read or do homework only when they get rewarded for it!” said No Teacher Ever.

2) Rewards Hurt Feelings. Okay, this is not a let’s create a safe-space, everyone gets a trophy kind of argument. My initial observation that some kids received rewards and others didn’t wasn’t just an observation. It was founded in research. I first noticed this when my oldest was in kindergarten. Her teacher had a common kindergarten system in place. The clip chart. On the clip chart, red is bad and green is good. I volunteered in her class from time to time and noticed that my child was often in red or yellow. She wasn’t a pain in the ass, but it turned out she struggled with learning and attention and couldn’t stay focused in class. She would be asked to “clip yourself down” when she wasn’t on task. The truth was, she had no clue why some kids stayed in the green all the time, and she had no idea why she (and most of the boys in class) didn’t; what she did know was that it didn’t feel fair. Here some kids were being publicly rewarded for having stronger social and emotional skills, and she was being punished for lacking the skills. What she needed was help and support, not embarrassment. What she got was embarrassment.

In all other ways her teacher was great and to this day my child loves her and is excited when she gets to see her, but this one system in her classroom made her not like school. It felt to her like the system was stacked against her, which is often the case for kids with learning disabilities and classroom reward systems. Since reward systems tend to be public (even without behavior charts), extra-recess, prizes won, special field trips, and rewards assemblies, the kids who struggle, are now publicly humiliated. In a PBS News Hour article, “Hey teachers, please stop using behavior charts. Here’s why” Wendy Thomas Russell writes about a friend’s child who so feared moving to yellow that she wanted to tape her mouth shut to go to school. She worried for the kids who were always in yellow and red, and when the day came that she was moved to yellow, she came home and told her parents that she wanted to kill herself. Did I mention she was 5?
Kids are in school to learn. Part of learning is learning strong Social and Emotional Skills. Some kids are equipped with more earlier on, and some are not. This could be due to environmental factors, hereditary factors, learning disabilities, maturation, or even gender. It would seem absolutely ridiculous to reward a kid for growing taller than everyone else, hitting puberty first, or having perfect vision. Rewarding kids for developing self-regulation or self-management first is just as arbitrary. And while unlike vision or puberty, self-regulation or self-management can be taught, it is important to note that there is no research that shows it is taught by punishing kids who don’t yet have it.

3) Rewards Don’t Change Behavior. I knew this long before I ever read motivation theory. In fact, I started to observe this in my third year of teaching. I worked in a high school that gave out P.R.I.D.E. tickets. This was some sort of acronym for how students should behave, and it was the joke of most of the students. Now these tickets were the real deal. Our administration had stocked a school store with small things like earbuds and keychains, but there were also cool prizes, like this new-fangled invention, the iPod. They were also giving away a car! If students received a P.R.I.D.E. ticket, their name went into a drawing for an S.U.V. It was donated, and pretty beat up, but these were high schoolers, and this was an S.U.V.! The idea was, the more tickets, the more chances they had at winning. With prizes like these, you would assume we had the cleanest, most well-behaved school around. On the contrary. Discipline issues actually increased. Students who weren’t receiving rewards were acting up even more, and students began to behave one way in front of teachers (to receive tickets) but another way in front of their classmates. I even had one student tell me in a moment of honesty that kids would intentionally throw trash on the ground and then wait until a teacher could see them to pick it up. In the end, a sophomore boy won the car, and behavior around the school had become worse than it was before the contest began.

Sure, my example is anecdotal. But if you want to read the research, there is plenty (Deci & Ryan, A. Kohn, Strauss, and Hur & Nordgren to name a few). Strauss, author of Punished by Rewards, discusses research out of Northwestern University where they studied work places who incentivized work performance, and found that monetary incentives led to people who became more interested in money and less interested in quality or performance. I found the same in my high school. Students weren’t suddenly interested in becoming better citizens; they were interested in winning a car. They actually became worse citizens (intentionally throwing trash on the floor, lying, telling on each other).

I wish I had some type of silver-bullet, a “do this, not that” sort of answer for how to actually change behavior. But in all honestly, it’s complex and really dependent on who you and your students are. What I do know is that rewards systems are not the answer (unless the question is, “how can I turn my students into materialistic, competitive, paranoid small humans who only want to work if they are given a reward?”)