Drawbacks of Extrinsic Motivation
The long view
Why do students do things in school?
I live in the mountains and spend a lot of time driving on quiet, empty highways. I don't really break the speed limit at all. I could, but I don’t. I also don't generally make a conscious choice to drive a certain speed. There are only three roads leaving my town, I've driven them lots of times, and I have pretty strong habits for how fast I drive. I leave the house and I drive the way I always drive.
One way people in education talk about motivation is in terms of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivation is the desire to get rewards or avoid punishments. Intrinsic motivation is the desire to do things that are interesting or enjoyable. When teachers think about trying to motivate students who aren't very engaged in school they often think of extrinsic and intrinsic motivators, brainstorming incentives, coming up with consequences, or trying to make learning more enjoyable for that student.
But when a student walks into my classroom and picks up a Do Now and answers a few questions at the start of class, or gets started on a worksheet of practice problems, they typically don't think in terms of extrinsic or intrinsic motivation. They don't say to themselves, "ok I need to do this or Mr. Kane will call my mom and tell her I'm not working hard enough," or "I really want a good grade in this class so I'll try my best," or "these problems look fun, I'd love to figure them out." They put effort in because it's a habit, because they've done it a few dozen times so far this school year. They do it without thinking about it. Or (I'm not a perfect teacher, I struggle to motivate lots of students) if they don't get started, that is also a habit they've developed.
Motivation to learn in school mostly comes from habits. It’s more like driving on the highway than deciding whether to take a new job. Students don't stop and think about whether they want to do every little thing we ask them to do. They do what they've done before, and what they see students around them doing. Those habits are what drive most learning in school. Extrinsic and intrinsic motivation might be good models for thinking about why people make life decisions or decide to try something new. But in a typical classroom in a typical school, extrinsic and intrinsic motivation mostly serve two functions. First, they help students to build habits. Second, they help to maintain habits when there is a break in the routine or something prompts a student to ask, "hey, why are we doing this?"
I think intrinsic motivation is important. We should do our best, within the constraints of schools and classrooms and resources, to make learning interesting and enjoyable. Those are especially important at the beginning of the school year when we are getting students into routines — and it's important that the intrinsic motivation is connected to the routines. If we do a bunch of fun and cool stuff the first week but it's totally different from how class will look the rest of the year, that motivation won't transfer well and won't help build habits and routines down the road.
Extrinsic motivation is also important. It's a big part of why I drive the way I do. I don't want to get speeding tickets, I don't want to hit an elk or a deer, I don't want to get in an accident. I don’t think about those things every time I drive, but they have shaped my habits. In school, I think the best way to think about extrinsic motivation is as a bunch of nudges that get students on the right track, and keep them on course over time. The goal isn’t to have a reward or consequence waiting around every corner or prompting a student’s every move.
Drawbacks of extrinsic motivation
Extrinsic motivation is also easy to screw up. The best extrinsic incentives are small, help get students into good habits and build effective routines, and then fade into the background as the year goes on, resurfacing as needed but out of sight as much as possible. Here are a bunch of ways that incentives can harm learning if we aren’t careful.
Avoidance. Extrinsic motivation is often framed in terms of consequences. Consequences can motivate students, but they can also lead to behavior that tries only to avoid the consequence. If I tell students I will call their families if they aren't working on a practice assignment, they may try very hard to look like they are working without actually doing much math. If students are only trying to avoid a consequence they often aren't doing what we want them to do.
Consistent incentives. One thing the research on extrinsic motivation is very clear about is that when we remove rewards or consequences, students often aren't very motivated anymore. We should ask ourselves: are we willing to use this incentive for the long haul? If we say we're going to do something but we're eventually going to get tired and stop, that's not a very effective motivator.
The student says no thanks. I see this a lot with things like detentions. The student simply says, "I don't mind being in detention" and doesn’t change their behavior. This has two effects. First, it means they're not doing what we want them to do. But second, this type of behavior is contagious. Other students learn that you can decline the transaction, and all of a sudden there are 30 kids in detention every day having a grand old time and showing up late to class but it’s ok because detention is pretty fun with all your friends.
Bargaining. This step often follows the last. Students aren't motivated by one extrinsic motivator so we bargain with them and say "ok, what about if we do this other thing?" Bargaining lowers the bar, setting lower expectations for students. This often frustrates students who were following the rules and wonder why they should do what we ask.
Rotten rewards. This post by Adam Boxer is one I think about all the time. Schools become obsessed with rewarding students. They end up rewarding kids who don’t deserve it, and the reward becomes hollow for everyone else. In Adam’s example it was the school giving a kindness award to a student who had bullied him for years. Schools that go all in on extrinsic motivation often end up doing stuff like this, and miss the kids who are sitting quietly, watching, and losing trust in the adults in the room.
Consistency between teachers. Kids have an innate and intense sense of what is fair and what is not. Extrinsic motivation works best if it is consistent. For every system, teachers and schools should ask: will we implement this consistently across classrooms? If not, is it still worth it?
Hard cutoffs. Inevitably, extrinsic motivation uses arbitrary cutoffs. Five seconds after this time and you're late, five seconds before and you're on time. 61 and you move on to the next grade, 59 and you don't. Miss two homeworks in a week and I’ll call home, miss one and I won’t. These cutoffs create weird incentives and can cause large differences in consequences between two students who are in similar situations. That creates frustration and often isn't what's best for one or both of those students.
Complications. In lots of schools, extrinsic incentives seem to get more and more complicated every year. We have this incentive, but then it creates X or doesn't account for Y, so we layer in another incentive, but that causes something else, so we add another one. There's no perfect system that will motivate every single kid through extrinsic motivation, and the more complicated it gets the harder it is to be consistent.
The long view
Extrinsic motivation is often used as a short-term solution. Kids are showing up late to class, what if we give them a starburst for showing up on time. Kids aren't doing the homework, hey I'll give you a pizza party if we have 90% homework completion for the next two weeks. Those might be decent ways to make a difference for a few days but it won't last. The hard message here is that habits are the most important factor in motivation and habits take a long time to develop. If students have bad habits, those habits take a long time to break. Extrinsic incentives are tempting as short-term fixes but they often aren’t structured in a way that sets students up for long-term success.
I focus on a few different motivators in my class. I try to make class interesting, to show students how they will use the math they learn in the future, to find lots of small ways to enjoy what we do every day. I also use a few incentives, including calling home, grades, our schoolwide system for tardies, and a few other small things in response to specific issues. I try to keep things very simple and transparent. Beyond incentives I pay really close attention to key routines and habits at the start of the year and talk to students to figure out how to course correct if we need to. I just don’t find complicated incentive systems to be worth it in the long run. Even the simple tools I use have plenty of drawbacks. There are also plenty of times when I realize a habit has slipped, and I am transparent with students about what needs to change and why. The start of the year and those moments when I’m resetting an expectation are the key times when I do a lot of family contact, and when I emphasize grades, and when I problem-solve with students who are having a tough time. That work pays dividends down the road, and helps me avoid the situation where I need to bribe students with starbursts to get them to do simple everyday learning tasks.