Using Rewards to Teach Students with Disabilities

Implications for Motivation

 

BRADLEY S. WITZEL AND CECIL D. MERCER

 

                  This article contains a wealth of information dealing with intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and how using rewards can both be helpful and detrimental to a student's learning. It focuses mainly on Special Education classrooms but the information is useful in all fields. Any more, most schools try to main stream special education students into regular classrooms in order to help them feel more included and knowing how to handle their behavior in a classroom is beneficial to all educators.

                  The article started out by describing how important it is dealing with students' behavior, especially when these students disabilities. Most special education students turn to inappropriate behavior and this behavior should not be rewarded. They are simply seeking out attention from the teacher. It is not that the teacher should not give them attention, just not for the action at hand. The inappropriate behavior should be dealt with first and then the real task is getting the student to feel motivated to act appropriately.

                  This is where the information starts to become more applicable to all educators and not just those in the field of Special Education. It first explains the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation which in a very general sense is the difference between doing a task because it is internally satisfying or doing it because someone or some thing else has inspired you to do it. It then goes on to state the controversy behind using extrinsic motivation. The authors then talk about the "external locus of control" which is the dependency that "young or immature" people show towards adults. Most special education students grasp onto this firmly and show this "helplessness" quite often. This is a reason why it is so important to find ways to get the students to become more intrinsically motivated.

                  The article then goes into describing what rewards are and how positive reinforcement is not always found in the form of these rewards, or is misinterpreted. This means that though a teacher thinks they are rewarding the student for a behavior or doing a task well, the student may view the teacher as rewarding him or her for something else. Thus the teacher is inadvertently rewarding the student for an action they do not want repeated.

                  The next part of the article is where the argument of whether extrinsic rewards can lead to intrinsic motivation comes to play. The article goes on with examples of both and both can be justified just by using this article. The most important conclusion made by either argument is that a reward could be both helpful or detrimental to the student later placing the task at intrinsic value level depending on what the reward is and moreover, how the reward was given. For example both arguments showed that students seemed to do better when given verbal praise which would be considered an extrinsic reward, but when actually given things as a reward, the outcomes did not agree.

                  The most important part of the article was the next part when it stated how a teacher should go about giving a reward. The first was that verbal praise was not the only choice a teacher had in giving rewards. They could also be accompanied by other forms of rewards as long as the verbal praise has shown relevance. Another interesting topic they discussed is the combination of both extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. Some students are not only motivated intrinsically to do a task (their example was sketching superheroes), but they may also appreciate the extrinsic motivation that accompanies it. They would not mind doing the task just for the sake of doing the task, but it would be nice to get some credit for it as well. Basically speaking, both forms of motivation should be taken into consideration when dealing with students. Even those with high levels of intrinsic motivation will desire some form of extrinsic motivation. The article also made it quite clear that students should all be given equal rewards for equal amounts of work. Both the student who received the A on the last test and the student who received a C deserve the same form of reward as long as they both tried as hard. If not, the student with the C will feel discouraged that nothing has come of their hard work and motivation will dissipate. This is especially important for teachers having to deal with classes that only have a small number of disabled students in them so they do not only show favor to their superior students, but also to the students who have tried just as hard and simply did not do as well.

                  This may seem long but it only scrapes the surface of all the valuable wealth of information within this article. As stated earlier, this article is one that would be beneficial for any teacher or future teacher to read.