Is Rewarding Scholastic Achievement Effective?

722 Words2 Pages

Rewarding scholastic achievement in grade school is a relatively new practice, and one that has come under much scrutiny as it grows more popular. In the short term, offering a student a reward for the completion of a scholastic task is likely to successfully make him pay attention to at least this particular assignment. However, injecting this model into a developing mind is potentially dangerous to some children's social development, and may well haunt them later in life. Debate about extrinsically rewarding students has raged for many years, and the practice itself is far older than that. Parents and teachers have rewarded students for good grades or behavior since the beginning of civilization and punished them for poor performance, and this practice will continue forever. Scholarships have rewarded good students with money for tuition and expenses for centuries. Formalizing it in our grade schools is a more recent concept, replacing time-tested physical punishment in today's soft, politically correct era. Children like to feel that they're in control, and incentivizing t...

Open Document