To give or not to give

No education student gets out of an Educ F. (Principles of Teaching 1) class without learning that giving rewards motivates the student to learn. When a student shows good performance in every activity—the argument goes—give him a reward in the form of, say, a plus point. The reason? To motivate the student to continue what he is doing.

But “for decades, psychologists have warned against giving children prizes or money for their performance in school. “Extrinsic” rewards, they say — a stuffed animal for a 4-year-old who learns her alphabet, cash for a good report card in middle or high school — can undermine the joy of learning for its own sake and can even lead to cheating,” according to a New York Times article, titled "Rewards for students under a microscope."

Although the practice of giving rewards has become more popular in some parts of the world, the danger with it is that “rewards may work in the short term but have damaging effects in the long term.”