The Reward Chart Backfire
A Year 4 teacher introduces a sticker chart to increase reading at home. Students earn one sticker per twenty minutes read and ten stickers earns a small prize. In the first month, reading minutes rise sharply. By week six, several students read only in twenty-minute blocks timed to the chart, stop when they reach ten stickers, and one student is caught logging minutes he did not read. A parent reports her daughter, who previously read for pleasure, now asks 'how many stickers is this book worth?' The teacher is unsure whether to continue, increase the rewards, or abandon the chart.
1. Explain this pattern using psychological theory about motivation, and evaluate the teacher's three options.
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The pattern fits the overjustification effect: an activity that was intrinsically rewarding becomes attributed to the external reward, so interest declines when the reward is salient. The chart also narrows behaviour to what is measured, producing timed reading and stopping at the threshold, and creates incentive for misreporting because the reward is contingent on a self-reported quantity.
Continuing unchanged is likely to entrench instrumental reading. Increasing rewards may raise short-term minutes but strengthens the external attribution and the incentive to game the system. Abandoning the chart removes the controlling contingency but may lose the students who genuinely needed a prompt to start.
A better option is to shift from a contingent reward to an informational one: praise, choice of books, and recognition of effort rather than minutes, while keeping expectations clear. This preserves the initial gain without making reading a transaction.
2. Design a brief modification that would test whether intrinsic motivation has been undermined, and state what result would support that conclusion.
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Remove the sticker contingency for two weeks while keeping the same books and time available, and record free-choice reading during an unstructured period. If reading minutes fall substantially below baseline for students who previously read for pleasure, while remaining elevated for students who had rarely read, this supports the interpretation that the chart had shifted the former group's motivation from intrinsic to external. If reading persists at prior levels, the overjustification account is weakened and the chart's effect may have been mainly a prompt. Measuring free-choice reading rather than logged minutes avoids the misreporting problem.