Chapter 10 page 212
Teacher B regularly gives tasks such as this: “Study these 20 words, and then we’ll have a test.
Everyone who gets at least 16 of 20 correct will get a sticker.”
Assuming that students want to get stickers, which teachers’ students will learn more? Most people
readily recognize that Teacher B’s students will learn more. After a while, many or most students in
Teacher A’s class will stop trying hard, because they decide that they have little chance to get the desired
stickers. In contrast, most of the students in Teacher B’s class will try hard because the teacher has set an
attainable goal for everyone. Teacher A has created an artificial scarcity of rewards by restricting the
stickers to 3 per test. Teacher B has created a situation in which all students who achieve at high levels are
recognized. It is no surprise that students learn much more with Teacher B than with Teacher A.
Many observers of education have argued that schools should be highly competitive because
society as a whole is highly competitive, and students need to learn to thrive in a highly competitive society.
However, this argument ignores the fact that successful corporations are effective in large part because
their employees collaborate successfully. And when companies attempt to use highly competitive reward
systems, it often backfires. To illustrate, here is a story told to me by a former corporate manager who was
responsible for managing large events such as conferences and shows around the country. He worked with
a team of about 20 people, all of whom had to work long, hard hours—usually on the road—to make the
events successful. For years, the company allowed the manager to reward all of his subordinates according
to whether their job performance was at a high level, and the manager spread the available money for
bonuses and raises among all who performed well. Morale was generally high, and he had little turnover in
employees. Later, however, the company decided to require managers to give all of the money available for
raises and bonuses only to the workers ranked in the top 20% of the work group. Now, even if the manager
believed that 75% of his workers had done everything he could possibly have asked, he had to select just 4
to reward. Soon the group’s performance dropped noticeably. Workers who did not receive bonuses or
raises were no longer willing to work such long, hard hours. They felt that the company was not treating
them properly. The quality of the events the workgroup was staging declined. Turnover increased sharply,
which posed serious problems, because it took more than a year to fully train each worker who left. And
workers stopped working for the sake of putting on a good event. They worked only when they thought that
their work would gain the notice of the manager, who would be responsible for deciding whether they
earned a bonus. By limiting the number of people who could receive monetary rewards, the company
intended to increase motivation. Instead, their policy had the precise opposite effect.
The example above is supported by a great deal of research. In the corporate world (xx) and in the
athletic world (xx), as well as in the classroom (xx), making rewards scarce within a team or class often
lowers performance.
There are many ways in which teachers can give recognition to all students. Teachers may have a
gigantic bulletin board where excellent work is posted. All students will have the opportunity to post
something that they have done well. Teachers can also use a variety of activities; students will have more
opportunities to earn recognition if they have an opportunity to try their hand at different kinds of activities.
Do not over-recognize or over-praise mediocre performance. The idea that teachers should aim
to recognize all students may imply that teachers will end up recognizing mediocre performance. If students
are performing poorly, then teachers can provide recognition only by lowering their standards so as to begin
giving recognition to poor performance.
However, motivational researchers do not in any way advocate giving undue recognition to
mediocre performance. In fact, teachers often cause problems by overpraising lower-performing children.
In one fascinating study, elementary school students said that students who were praised a lot were the poor
students, whereas students who were criticized a lot were the good students (ref xx). Think about this for a
moment. This suggests that the teachers were probably overpraising inadequate performances, and that the
students knew it, too. It also means that these students are getting fewer opportunities to learn from
criticism, which is a double disadvantage. Students who are overpraised in this way will not develop a self
of self-efficacy. Instead, they will come to believe that they are in fact not very “smart,” which is why their
teachers praise them so much.