Non-monetary rewards in education

Abstract

This paper presents evidence how pupils choose different types of non-monetary rewards for educational attainment. These rewards are external to the learning process, but unlike cash-for-grades rewards internal to the practice of schooling. We collected data from a non-incentivized survey and an incentivized survey, which was part of a larger field experiment. The non-incentivized survey was conducted prior to the field experiment to elicit pupils’ stated preferences over seventeen non-monetary rewards and to choose the rewards for the field experiment. In the incentivized survey, pupils then had the freedom to choose one out of four rewards: (i) a medal, (ii) a parent-letter, (iii) a no-homework voucher, or (iv) a surprise, allowing us to elicit pupils’ valuation for different non-monetary rewards. We found that the preferred non-monetary reward varied by pupils’ ability. Low-performing pupils were significantly more likely to choose the parent-letter than high-performing pupils. Moreover, we found little evidence for heterogeneous preferences by socioeconomic background.

Keywords:

• Reward choice
• non-monetary rewards
• education

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the teachers and pupils who participated in the experiment and the organisers of the Känguru-Wettbewerb for providing the test questions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).