Tag: grades

Overjustification Effect: Rewards Inhibit Intrinsic Motivation

Kids become less intrinsically motivated to do something when they expect a reward — grades, gold stars, special privileges — for doing them. In fact, when you take away the reward they’ll stop doing things they were previously interested in doing on their own. It’s called the overjustification effect (Lepper et al., 1973; summary here).

There’s been a lot of research demonstrating the effect. An overview of the research in 1995 (Tang and Hall, 1995) found that the effect extends across all age groups.

The primary theory that explains the effect is called Cognitive Evaluation Theory, and is very well summarized here. This theory suggests, however, that extrinsic motivation may not be bad in all situations, because praise and rewards can also server as a useful indicator to a student of their competence.

Grades Nullify the Benefits of Useful Feedback

Grades detract from learning so much that if you give students comments and grades, they tend to ignore the comments and focus on the grades. If you give them comments alone, they’ll actually learn from the comments.

When giving students feedback on both oral and written work, it is the nature, rather than the amount, of commentary that is critical. Research experiments have established that, while student learning can be advanced by feedback through comments, the giving of numerical scores orgrades has a negative effect, in that students ignore comments when marks are also given.

— Black et al., 2004. Working Inside the Black Box: Assessment for Learning in the Classroom in Phi Delta Kappan, Vol. 86, No. 1, September 2004, pp. 9-21.