The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (2010) encourages teachers and their students to "use the target language as exclusively as possible (90% plus) at all levels of instruction during instructional time and, when feasible, beyond the classroom," and local boards of education around the world, including here in…

Typical assessments of temporal discounting involve presenting choices between hypothetical monetary outcomes. Participants choose between smaller immediate rewards and larger delayed rewards to determine how the passage of time affects the subjective value of reinforcement. Few studies, however, have compared such discounting to actual…

The study with two elementary students who had low levels of completion and accuracy on daily arithmetic assignments found that a negative consequence was not necessary and that use of a positive component alone was sufficient to maintain high levels of completion and accuracy. (Author/DB)

Study of 91 elementary school pupils indicates that in regular classroom situations spelling proficiency can be increased through the use of material and social reinforcement. (Author)

Examines the effects of frequency and contingency of reinforcement on the social deprivation-satiation phenomenon. Third- and fourth-grade children were given pretraining involving variations of reinforcement in the form of praise. In a subsequent discrimination test, correct responses were consistently praised. (Author/SS)

The main argument being presented in this paper is that instructional designers and educational researchers need to shift their attention from performance to interest. Educational digital games have to aim at building lasting interest in real world applications. The main hypothesis advocated in this paper is that the use of rewards in educational…

The present study evaluates the immediate effects of an experimentally manipulated social comparison on the subsequent behavior of lower socioeconomic status black children four to five and seven to eight years of age. The effects of four conditions of social comparison are measured with respect to the children's self-reinforcement,…

The dynamics of success and praise are discussed. Guidelines designed to improve the chances of successful use are provided. A checklist of eight questions teachers can ask themselves about the use of praise is included. (MP)

Praise and criticism data were collected during a two-year correlational study of a selected sample of second- and third-grade teachers chosen for their consistency in producing student learning gains averaged over four years, and these data were analyzed to determine the effect that praise, criticism, rewards, and punishment had on learning…

The article presents a practical sequence for setting up a group reward system and offers guidelines for decisions concerning program implementation and termination. (DB)

Study results indicate that overly powerful extrinsic rewards can reduce intrinsic motivation and suggest that there is a need to control unnecessarily powerful reward systems. (Author/DW)

Describes a South Carolina elementary school principal's program for decreasing discipline referrals and creating a positive school environment. The Great Behavior program involves weekly drawings and prizes for well-behaved students and an end-of-school party and pie-throwing event. Following a first-year 47 percent reduction in discipline…

This paper represents a report of a year-long case study of the implementation of a token economy in an entire elementary school. The effort was intended to provide teachers with an alternative to corporal punishment as a form of school discipline. In this report, both the successful and unsuccessful procedures are described in chronological…

THE USE OF REWARDS AS INCENTIVES TO INFLUENCE BEHAVIOR WAS STUDIED AND AN EVALUATION WAS MADE OF THE INCENTIVE VALUE OF EACH OF THE REWARDS. PORTABLE VERSIONS OF THE WISCONSIN GENERAL TEST APPARATUS WERE USED TO TEST 120 CHILDREN FROM GRADES 1, 3, AND 5. FOR A DISCRIMINATION LEARNING TEST EACH CHILD WAS PRESENTED 5 STIMULI THAT WERE SELECTED FROM…