The Effect of Rewards on Intrinsic Motivation

For next Monday's meeting I delved a little deeper into a section of Chapter 2 of Bain's book. Chapter 2 is titled "What Do We Know About How We Learn?" and the section I pursued a little more is "What Motivates, What Discourages." Specifically I focused on some work by Edward L. Deci on the effect of rewards on intrinsic motivation. In Bain's book he discusses a study in which Deci and his colleagues gave the subjects a puzzle to play with and left the room. Some of the subjects received rewards in the form of payment, others did not. What they found is that the people who received rewards quickly lost interest in the puzzle once the rewards stopped whereas those that did not receive rewards continued to be interested. I looked more closely at some of the research regarding rewards and intrinsic motivation and read a meta analysis that Deci et al. wrote in 1999 reviewing nearly 30 years of research in the field. Here is the link to the abstract and you can download the PDF if you want. It's pretty long.
The general idea is that Deci et al. have created a theory they call Cognitive Evaluation Theory (CET) to predict the effects of rewards on behavior. They find that tangible rewards (money, prizes, etc.) tend to decrease a person's motivation to do an interesting activity. Verbal rewards (positive feedback) in contrast generally tend to increase a person's motivation as long as the feedback is perceived to be informational rather than controlling. They found that verbal feedback which was controlling would also decrease intrinsic motivation. So, essentially if people felt that they were being coerced into doing something, even if they enjoyed doing it initially, they lost interest.

This has profound implications for teaching since evaluation of student work is such a large part of traditional education. Often students do the work to get the grade. My wife, who is a high school teacher, talks about the grade grubbers, students who come weaseling to get a few extra points because they have their sights set on the grade rather than the learning. Although many things are interesting to learn about, very few students would spend time learning them outside of school or assignments. Is this because of the grade based evaluation system? Perhaps. In Ken Bain's book it becomes clear later that many of the best teachers were selected because they inspired interest in their subject which lasted after the students had left their classes. Often, these classes had an atmosphere which was described to be more collaborative, with the professor acting as a facilitator rather than a dictator and the students having significant freedom to decide the course of the class. Evaluation was often left until the end of the term with informational feedback given throughout the course to help students address areas that needed work.
These results seem to mesh fairly well with Deci's theory and it means that to enhance student interest in learning we need to move away from a system which dangles grades as a carrot in front of the students toward a system which supplies meaningful feedback and guidance. I'm sure that this is easier said than done.