How to Use Rewards to Help Children Learn — and Why Teachers Don’t Use Them Well
By Herbert J. Walberg and Joseph L. Bast
Years of fad education strategies have left us with a public education system that largely rejects the tried-and-true method of using rewards to spur student achievement.
This book shows how rewards motivate students to learn and how their appropriate use accelerates learning. For some readers this merely confirms the ancient commonsense view that “incentives matter.” Children seek praise from adults and strive to win in competitions with their peers while adults work harder for recognition, raises, promotions, and other rewards.
Learning is easier and faster when properly designed incentive systems are used, but teachers are trained not to use them, almost entirely for ideological reasons. Abandoning incentives, as many contemporary educators have done, is unfair to students and in some cases may permanently damage their ability to grow into responsible and productive adults.
With more than 400 endnotes — most of them with live links to original sources — Rewards forcefully and effectively defends the use of incentives and rewards in K-12 education. It bridges from incentive for students (at home and in classrooms) to incentive for teachers (performance-based pay) to incentive for schools (school choice). Failure to use rewards in classrooms has contributed to a public education crisis we must address if we want to preserve our freedom and prosperity.
Part 1 addresses the question Why Use Rewards? Chapters address the psychology of motivation, the economics of incentives, rewards and learning, and setting the right goals.
Part 2 addresses How to Use Rewards. Its chapters cover rewards at home, rewards in elementary schools, and rewards in secondary schools.
Part 3 addresses Using Rewards to Accelerate Learning. Chapters cover tests with rewards, rewarding good teachers, rewards and digital learning, and rewards and school choice.
Walberg and Bast conclude:
“We hope this book inspires parents to make greater use of properly designed rewards at home as part of their all-important roles as their children’s first and only truly life-long teachers. We hope educators will re-examine their views on the use of rewards in their classrooms and come away convinced, as we are, that rewards are an essential tool for instilling the habits and skills students need to succeed in school and beyond. Finally, we hope policymakers will work with parents and educators to remove the roadblocks to a greater use of rewards in education by adopting or expanding policies such as tests with rewards, performance-based pay for teachers, digital learning, and school choice.
“With so much at stake, and with so much research readily at hand pointing to the right solutions, why wait any longer?”
Available in a Kindle edition here: https://www.amazon.com/Rewards-rewards-children-learn-teachers-ebook/dp/B07G2NZSYB/
