This research describes the concept of reward as a motivator for children's education and development, more effective than a system of punishment. Such a system should be recognized on the basis of the relative impact of reward and punishment, i.e.. reward is powerful because of its connection with authority symbols, such as parents, and the reinforcement of attitudes in desirable and functional behavioral repertoires of development. Punishment has a contrary tendency to teach the behaviors that are punished, not to extinguish them.
Skinnerian logic on rewards is that it assists learning through reinforcing effective communication by which the acquisition of knowledge or information is enhanced. These are well-established social measures formulated as contingent relations between behavior and its consequences as cause and effect. That is, the effects of reinforced learning include feelings and actions whose connection with reinforcers is an important consideration in operant conditioning.
This is an extremely complex situation in which reinforcing consequences are contingent upon both behavior and the setting in which learning occurs. Rewards play an important role in regard to these reinforced contingencies including the process of behavior modification. Reward is an example of these reinforcers in that it is a positive reinforcer in behavior modification, i.e., the effective contingencies of reinforcement.
It has always been the task of formal education to set up or modify behavior which would prove useful or enjoyable later in a student's life. Punitive methods (punishments) do not merit the same value in learning as positive reinforcement (rewards) in a future context. The positive consequences that generate a useful behavioral repertoire need not be any more explicitly relevant to the future than were the punitive consequences of the past. The student needs current rewards to satisfy educational goals now r...