Gold Stars Diminish Motivation

When extrinsic rewards are used to motivate children, like gold stars, stickers, prizes and events, the motivation to complete that task, even if it was originally an exciting one, diminishes.

At the beginning of my teaching career, I saw that teachers in Sunday Schools and Gurukulas would give students gold stars or other prizes for memorizing Gita slokas. Having been raised in an environment without extrinsic rewards, I was surprised. (We were the kids who only got to hear about how our friends got $1 for doing their chores and $5 for getting good grades. I remember wondering why my parents didn’t do that!) I was surprised to hear that extrinsic rewards would be attached to learning Gita verses because I had always found natural taste in connecting scripture. According to the philosophy of bhakti, a soul-deep joy and grace is innately present in connecting with holy texts. Krishna, the source of pleasure, is non-different from his words. In addition, children find spontaneous pleasure in singing songs, exploring different tunes with vocal chords, and discussing how philosophy relates to them. In my experience, scripture discussions provide a perfect place from kids to share all the amazing ideas in their heads.

So, I would watch. Students would line up to recite their verse and get a gold star upon completion. Was this a good plan? They seemed really eager to have that gold star added to their charts for everyone to see. It couldn’t be that bad, could it? But as time passed, I noticed that the internal joy in the activity itself seemed to be missing. Instead the task of learning became a rote, almost mechanical, one; one of competition (look how many gold stars I have!) or a feeling of failure (for those didn’t have the ability to memorize the difficult Sanskrit terms).

I decided to re-establish the Gita instruction in the school. The gold-star system was nixed. We learned the meaning of words, used fun hand movements that they came up with, engaged in deep philosophical discussions with “what-if” scenarios, made up tunes of the English translations and had much fun. Students tapped into their internal joy in memorizing Sanskrit words and year after year, I get messages from parents at home who find their kids singing these songs and discussing the verses in front of friends and relatives, unprompted, during holidays and weekends. Score!

Here is a study, excerpted from Montessori: The Science Behind the Genius by Angeline Stoll Lillard, to prove how motivation diminishes with extrinsic rewards.

“...Extrinsic rewards undermine motivation once the rewards are removed. In one experiment, undergraduates solved 3-dimensional puzzles, in which one creates a specific shape from a set of smaller shapes, across three puzzle-solving sessions (Deci, 1971). Participants had leeway as to how long they worked on each puzzle and whether they actually solved them. During the middle session, some participants were offered $1 for each puzzle they correctly solved. The experimenters tracked how long the students engaged in the activity in the third session as compared with the first. Participants who were rewarded in the middle session decreased the amount of time spent on the puzzles in the last session, whereas participants in the control group showed no change.”

So, put away those gold stars, people! Put away the charts and awards and trophies. Allow your children to feel the joy inherent in learning. Spark that excitement in them by setting up an environment where they will love to learn and trust them.