Reinforcement Practicality for Middle School Students: A Meta-Analysis

The need for evolving support interventions that can help students in a wide range of settings is an ongoing requirement for middle schools today. Token reinforcement, which is a form of extrinsic motivation and incentivization, is studied within this meta-analysis to determine if significant treatment effects exist overall and if there are studies that show more gains than others. Most studies report significant positive gains individually, but the statistical significance is lost when the studies are reviewed as a whole. Variables such as sample size requirements, treatment effect variation, and session time all influence treatment effect size. Reinforcement has been shown to be a viable strategy for differentiation, but the area of standardization has yet to be adequately addressed within past and present research. Some effect size traits reported from the literature are supported within this meta-analysis, but the sampling, analysis, and interpretation protocols exhibited by certain studies make it difficult to remove bias and confounding within reinforcement studies. Further research avenues and additional considerations are discussed