Student incentives seem to boost reading scores, according to a newly released piece of research. Critics have described plans to give cash, electronic gear or other rewards as bribery, but the study of charter school incentive programs from Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes finds “reward systems are found to have stable and consistent positive impacts for student learning in reading. The effect holds across grades and across network and non-network charter schools.”
“It’s not a silver bullet, but for very little investment, you seem to get a pretty consistent bump,” Margaret E. Raymond, the study’s author, said in an interview with Education Week.
Read a summary of the findings here. The full report, “Paying for A’s” is here.
The success of incentives will get all the ink, but this finding caught my eye: “Schools in which there is continuous or near-continuous assessment of student conduct produce larger gains in reading than schools that have reward systems.”
