April 20 was University Day at UMPI. On that day students faculty, staff and community members were all welcomed to attend poster sessions and presentation. One such presentation was “Are Students Being Punished by Rewards?” featuring Vannessa Hodgkin, Michelle Tardif and Karen Cote.
In the presentation, they stated at first that rewards are used to control people. For example, people go to school and get good grades because they want good grades. Because of the rewards, some students work for grades instead of working to learn knowledge. Instead of doing this because they want to be a better person or help their community, they are doing this because they want rewards.
According to the rewards we will work too well. Because once we start wanting to earn rewards we cannot stop. If we had never started using grades and students had just wanted to learn, then they wouldn’t be working for the grades
According to the presentation there are five reasons rewards fail. The first reason is that once we start to use rewards, we cannot stop. The second reason is that rewards are not helpful in building relationships. An example would be if a person worked in a group and she failed so the group cannot get rewards. Everybody in this group will be yelling at this person. The third reason is that rewards require no attention to the original problems. The fourth reason is that rewards discourage passion. Once you get the rewards you will not go further to seek more new things. The last reason is that we lose motivation. We are after money, grades and other things.
So it seems that we learn best if the “reward” is the knowledge itself.
