Rewards for students

NYTimes today runs an article on renewed interest in and investigation of rewards on student performance. Tellingly, from an behavioral standpoint, the title refers to "rewards for students" rather than rewarding behaviors by students:

HEALTH | March 03, 2009
Rewards for Students Under a Microscope
By LISA GUERNSEY
Are there benefits to paying students for good performance in school?

(In essence, then, those talking about rewards are talking about one thing while those talking about reinforcement are talking about another, i.e., "reward" does not equal "reinforcement". However, these concepts are so often confused that one can't talk to the issue from a behavioral standpoint without doing what I'm having to do here.)

And that, I think, is the faulty part of the extrinsic-intrinsic rewards debate: Whether or not "rewards" have a lasting effect on student performance is accounted for less by where the rewards (or potential reinforcers) fall on a (false) extrinsic-intrinsic rewards dichotomy and is accounted for more by (a) if the reward actually reinforces student behaviors leading to better performance over the long term, (b) if the increased performance brings the student into contact with more automatically occurring reinforcement for the behavior that would not be contacted adequately to sustain performance otherwise, or (c) if increased performance makes the behaviors fluent enough that the effort to perform is now outweighed by the payout of automatically occurring reinforcement.

As usual, with "rewards" you get the most bang for your buck when you choose the right behavior to reward and the reward increases the rate of the behavior over time -- that is, the reward actually reinforces the behavior.

One implication is that research into which academic behaviors lead to better long term performance (reading for pleasure being one example) may be more fruitful than research for arguing the intrinsic/extrinsic debate.