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 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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Sign- and goal-tracking are differentially associated with drug abuse-related behavior. Recently, it has been hypothesized that sign- and goal-tracking behavior are mediated by different neurobehavioral valuation systems, including differential incentive salience attribution. Herein, we used different conditioned stimuli to preferentially elicit…

The purpose of this study is to determine if incentive programs like Renaissance impact high school students and faculty. Incentives can go a long way for students in schools. At Lehigh Senior High School (LSHS), for example, students were introduced to the Renaissance Program this school year, by receiving goodies. Coupons at Dairy Queen,…

The current study examined whether monetary incentives could increase engagement and achievement in a job-skills training program for unemployed, homeless, alcohol-dependent adults. Participants (n?=?124) were randomized to a no-reinforcement group (n?=?39), during which access to the training program was provided but no incentives were given; a…

Motivation is a complicated issue. There are myriad reasons why people choose to do what they do. For example, employees usually work for money, students study to earn grades, heart attack victims learn that when they diet they will live longer--the list of extrinsic motivators is endless. Conversely, there are things people do just for the…

A growing body of literature has been examined and discussed the effects of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation on student learning at the college level. Intrinsically motivated individuals have been able to develop high regards for learning various types of course information without the inclusion of external rewards or reinforcements. In…

This is the second in a series of six papers from the Center on Education Policy exploring issues related to students' motivation to learn. As noted in the first paper of this series, motivation to learn is one of the most important factors in a student's educational journey, but a robust discussion about students' motivation may be the "missing…

How effective are rewards (for cooperation) and punishment (for noncooperation) as tools to promote cooperation in social dilemmas or situations when immediate self-interest and longer term collective interest conflict? What variables can promote the impact of these incentives? Although such questions have been examined, social and behavioral…

This study examined how particular grading systems motivate students. Since competency-based grading and point systems are most prevalent (Hendrickson and Gable, 1999), the current study is modeled around these systems. The grading systems used for this study were divided into two categories and defined as those students who earned their grades…