Extrinsic vs Intrinsic Motivaton

There has been a need for some kind of 'motivation' for our younger students. There was period of time where we were seeing big shifts of improvement in both behaviour and learning with our older students. They were particularly motivated by the progress pebbles and feedback, but the younger students were not responding to it.

There was talk of using extrinsic motivation ie stickers, which other experienced members believed would make an impact. However, there was doubts that this approach would not fit in the philosophy of the school. The response from the school was it is dependent on the needs of the students and to justify it to the leadership team.

We ran a trial with stickers, gathered some research and collected student voice and parental feedback. The results were surprising and extremely valuable.

During the trial the students reacted impressively, and we saw an instant reaction of many students behaviour completely reversed and all students reacting a positive way. The biggest find was the amount of positive feedback mentors were giving for the sticker, there was huge increase in feedback. We did not want to control behaviour purely through stickers but a way of reinforcing values and capacities in the habitat. Two hundred stickers in a week, is a lot of feedback!!

The research found clarified that our younger students can not rely on extrinsic motivation, in fact it simply doesn't work at that age. However, there was only a short period of time before it started to have some impact, so stickers would be a short term tool to allow students experience or motivate them to experience extrinsic motivation.

Student voice was the biggest surprise. The students clearly valued them and understood what they were for and a clear reason for the sticker was an expectation because they wanted to give that reason at home. Every student made it clear that they must take the sticker home, otherwise it meant nothing to them. We are now sellotaping them on!

Parent feedback was extremely positive. The parents were appreciating the learning conversations at home discussing what they have learnt and why they got the sticker, particularly boys. The feedback was that boys, when asked about their day, simply replied ok or good and very little else. This was gateway to discussions and fitting in with reward systems at home.

Six Week Review
The stickers have had a huge impact on the habitat, so much so that it all students are learning more in one way or another. There has been a tail off, but it was due to mentors giving out less stickers ie less positive feedback. The parental feedback continues to be extremely positive and please keep it going as they creating so many learning conversations.

To encourage collaboration we have collected scores for stickers and acknowledge the stickers at the end of each day. The students have responded to that too, and are clearly 'trying' hard to gain stickers.

Our next step was to give out stickers will eventually be given out less and less, to see if we still have the motivation to learn without them. But we did that and their motivation did drop off so we are not quite ready for that yet. We will continue till the end of term and review it again.