As we know, the concept of rewarding students for certain behaviors has been widely understood and as a practice it has been even more widely used by teachers for a long time. https://www.siue.edu/~ptheodo/foundations/index Many elementary level teachers even prefer it and depend on it as their basis for classroom management as a whole, with reward charts, special prize or token charts or extra game time for example, in order to lead students through the desired actions and behavior every day. I have seen that this can be productive up to a point, especially with younger chuldren, but if other forms of motivation are not nurtured, as students grow into older and more complex learning environments, some of them are unable to work on tasks that are not clearly instructed, and worse still, some older students are so accustomed to the “reward” system that it is difficult to teach them constructive critical thinking skills stemming from their own desire to learn or accomplish. It is that sense of accomplishment that can lead to further feelings of instrinsic motivation, yet it can be quite difficult to tap into that as a teacher when it has lain “dormant”.