Fostering Student Responsibility: The Effectiveness of Incentive-Based Systems

The purpose of this research was to determine whether implementing an incentive-based system for middle schoolers would increase student responsibility in the areas of arriving on time to class, bringing all required materials to class, turning assignments in on time, and including names on assignments. In an English-language arts classroom of twenty-two sixth graders, a system was implemented in which the students’ responsibility in the four aforementioned categories was recorded daily. Their performance in a randomly chosen category each day either increased or hindered their likelihood of earning the ultimate reward dependent on their overall performance over the twenty-three day span. Results, though not conclusive, indicated that the incentive system encouraged responsible student behavior. Daily student performance in each of the four categories was not consistent over the twenty-three experiment days; however, students earned the ultimate reward. These results suggest that the system was an effective behavior intervention and could lend to further research and practice