Praise Tokens and Grades

Extrinsic rewards such as praise for doing well, stickers, and even grades are often used while teaching. I'm sure that we have all had experience with some type of praise mentioned above. I can remember getting smiley faced stickers and star stickers for doing well on penmanship assignments in kindergarten. I'm sure we are all familiar with the grading process, the better you do the better grade you get with an A usually being the thing to aim for. The thing is, is this the way that we as educators should go about getting our students motivated?

The problem with extrinsic rewards is that you can never be sure why a student is doing something. Do they just want to be able to brag about getting high scores? Does praise give them a sense of self worth? There are many more questions that came be asked when it comes to the reward system. What type of things can we do to make sure that the motivation for doing well is encouraged without creating a false sense of self worth etc?

Why do we continue to use these things if they are so controversial? The answer is that it is simply easier to motivate students to do things for reward rather than just the sake of doing it to gain knowledge. We as the teachers have to come up with ways that incorporate both extrinsic rewards and intrinsic rewards in the same system. For example, why not take the grade out of the picture for a certain project? Let the students discover something related to a topic being taught that interests them and explore it to their hearts content. If we do projects that are geared toward the experience of the process instead of geared toward grades, would that not be a way to change the motivation of students?