School-wide behavior problems can vary significantly from structured to unstructured settings. Often problem behaviors can spike during unstructured times such as lunch and recess and the use of Tier 1 positive behavior interventions and supports (PBIS) can be used to reduce student behavior problems in these settings. Using a token economy as an…

The educational system today often relies on incentives in order to motivate students. However, it might also encourage students to engage in deceptive behaviour (e.g. malingering) in order to reach certain benefits. Hereby, we investigated whether students would intentionally fabricate symptoms (i.e. malinger) when confronted with a…

The need for evolving support interventions that can help students in a wide range of settings is an ongoing requirement for middle schools today. Token reinforcement, which is a form of extrinsic motivation and incentivization, is studied within this meta-analysis to determine if significant treatment effects exist overall and if there are…

The context in which reward-paired cues are encountered can resolve ambiguity and set the occasion for appropriate reward-seeking. The psychological processes by which contexts regulate reward-seeking remain unclear as contexts are diffuse and difficult to isolate from other stimuli. To overcome this, we modeled a context as a phasic and discrete…

This dissertation investigates an overarching research question: how can recognition-type incentives, such as gamification and peer gifting, motivate users' knowledge seeking and contributions in e-learning and online Q&A (question and answer) communities? To address this question, I conducted three studies. In Chapter 2, I examine how social…

Motivationally attractive cues can draw in behavior in a phenomenon termed incentive salience. Incentive cue attraction is an important model for animal models of drug seeking and relapse. One question of interest is the extent to which the pursuit of motivationally attractive cues is related to the value of the paired outcome or can become…

This article advocates for system-level change in prenatal health services. Specifically, the authors describe how they "discovered" the idea of father-inclusive prenatal health care (FIPH), which involves providing an array of services to help young expectant fathers prepare for the challenges of parenthood. Over the course of 25 years,…

The authors evaluated whether an incentive raffle increased teachers' use of written praise and appropriate student behavior. Participants included 93 staff members and 755 students at an elementary school in Central Illinois. School staff received didactic instruction for the importance of using praise, and praise notes were measured on a weekly…

Objective: Mobile health apps hold potential to support and reinforce positive health behaviours, especially among young people with chronic diseases like asthma that require continual self-management. We aimed to gain feedback from adolescents with asthma on two existing asthma self-management apps to guide the development of an evidence- and…

Demotivating factors are one of the sources that can reduce students' motivation toward language learning. This study investigated language learning demotivating factors among high school EFL students. It also explored the educational implications and recommendations for promoting EFL students' motivation from teachers' perspectives. A total of…

The use of these systems can enhance students' participation in instructional activities. However, to use token systems effectively, the system must be individualized and tailored to meet the needs of the child. In order to individualize the token system for each student, teachers should (1) identify an array of back-up reinforcers for the…

While it may seem almost intuitive that offering rewards to students will yield better results, that is not how it works; the result often is the opposite. The paradox of rewards is that their effect often has a limited impact on students, who then will lose curiosity; it also makes them feel as if they are being controlled--a negative motivating…

Purpose/Objectives: The purpose of this study was to determine the impact of teacher encouragement on elementary school student vegetable snack consumption. Methods: Twelve Wisconsin elementary school teachers were randomly assigned different levels of encouragement procedures during vegetable snack time. The consumption levels of 218 students…

A growing number of schools have begun experimenting with giving students cash rewards to improve academic performance. This practice has come to be known as "cash-for-grades." In this article, I examine some of the philosophical and ethical questions involved with cash-for-grades programmes, rather than focusing on whether such…

Teacher praise is an effective classroom management tool. Training teachers to increase their use of praise can improve student disruptive and off-task behavior. The purpose of this article is to examine different characteristics of praise and the training methods used in the literature. Training methods with positive treatment acceptability and…