Marbles Jar
I wrote this post in response to the excellent and highly recommended article “Reward and Praise: The Poisoned Carrot”, by Robin Grille.
I am sure you are all familiar with the concept of a classroom “marbles jar”. This jar has various versions: sometimes it’s an actual jar of marbles; sometimes it’s a box of notes; sometimes it’s a transparent plastic container filled with small stones. The implementation varies, but the basic idea is the same: every time the children in class do something good, the teacher puts another marble in the jar. When the jar fills up, the children receive a class gift of their choice: a pizza party, a movie played in class, etc. What are these good deeds that help to fill up the jar?That varies from grade to grade. In the lower grades, the deeds are often tied to discipline-related behaviors: all the children sit quietly during meetings,the children move quietly in the hallway between classrooms, etc. In the higher grades, the behavior is usually related to values of friendship, which are important for the school to introduce to children: a child helping a friend, a child helping a teacher, and so on. This sounds like a good idea in general,doesn’t it? It is absolutely a better method than punishing “bad” behaviors, so you’re probably asking yourselves, what is the problem?
The method of rewarding good behavior is based on the behaviorist movement, and it’s backed up by research that shows how rats can be trained to solve maze puzzles, or dogs can be trained to drool when a bell associated with the arrival of food is rung. The idea sounds simple: the researcher again and again offers a reward to the animal in the experiment, and the animal adopts the behavior which earns it the reward. Behavior design works similarly on children: we offer them a reward for good behavior again and again, and they adopt this behavior to earn the reward. The problem is that it’s not as simple as it sounds and as we can see in the next paragraphs, this method loses its efficiency as time goes on.
The first obstacle to the reward system arises when the marbles or the praise stop coming. There are many research studies which show that over time the reward method loses its efficiency and no longer produces the desired results. When the reward stops coming and eventually it always does stop coming or the frequency with which the behavior is rewarded diminishes, the behavior it is meant to elicit disappears and the system disintegrates. The behavior is connected directly to the marble (reward), and when there is no marble anymore, the behavior disappears. One of the main reasons for this is the source of motivation. When a child does something for a reward, his or her motivation is entirely external. The deed itself doesn’t interest the child. She only cares about it insofar as she wants to impress the adult handing out the reward. The price is high: no reward, no interest in doing the deed. The child has no sense of internal motivation or exhibiting a particular behavior because that is the expected behavior. That’s how we find our children (and ourselves as adults) “addicted” to rewards/praise/prestige. When these stop coming, we sink into despair and in order to reengage interest in the behavior, the reward must be increased or the praise made greater. The child’s inner motivation diminishes, yet internal motivation is the most important motivation for action. It is also the only motivation that maintains itself for an extended period of time.
The second obstacle to this rewards system is the negativity that is generated by this approach. Competition, jealousy, and distrust are the flip side to the satisfaction and joy that the reward method creates. For every child who got a marble, there are three children who didn’t get a marble; worse yet, there are two more children who thought they did everything for that marble but still didn’t get it. Marbles and praises are existential threats to cooperation and team work, which are so imperative to our existence as human beings.
The last obstacle, and perhaps the most surprising one, is performance quality. Many studies show that when children expect or hope for a reward, their performance actually worsens. The same research shows that reward methods suppress children’s creativity, mainly because these methods encourage them to take fewer risks. The children want to “play it safe” and avoid challenges as much as they can, just to be sure that they get the reward.
Behavior modification methods based on rewards are really just the other side of the coin of methods based on punishments. The relationship with a teacher or parent who rewards is very similar to that with a teacher or parent who punishes, and many researchers suggest that the parents who use rewards are also the parents who widely use punishments. Often, when rewards stop working, punishments are implemented.
Rewards are an easy solution to encourage behavior that meets expectations; they are much easier than waiting for a child to develop internal motivation. Rewards are usually the quickest solution (after punishments) to achieve manageable behavior. And when you take into account the amount of material that a 3rd grade teacher has to teach her students, along with the great number of children in class, it’s understandable that a teacher would naturally choose the quickest solution to classroom management as it leads to pretty good results in the short term. This, in my opinion, is the biggest problem of “traditional” education systems: the main goal of a school is to teach factual knowledge to the children. To aid in achieving this goal, almost all means are legitimate. Modern schools may use the reward method and not the punishment method because it feels like a ”friendlier” approach, but eventually, the goal of the two methods is the same: control the children’s behavior quickly so they can be ”taught” as much knowledge as possible as quickly as possible.
Children are born with great passion for learning; they also have an internal ability for honesty, empathy, and consideration of others. In my opinion, a good education system is one that knows how to make such characteristics stand out in children. Emphasizing a child’s understanding of and connection to his or her internal motivation, encouraging children to learn out of personal interest in a subject, cooperate out of knowing that together, their sum is more valuable than the components, and to show empathy and consideration of others, which comes from the heart and gives them an internal feeling of happiness and value,is the best education we can provide.
That is why at Acton we only have to goals for the Elementary years – for the Eagles to love learning and to love to work well with others.