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THREE
TYPES
OF INCENTIVES AND
THE
CLASSROOM LEARNING
MARTIN
L.
BENOWITZ
AND
JOSEPH
G.
ROSENFELD'
Temple
University
OF
MIDDLE- AND LOWER-CLASS CHILDREN
Researchers have found that children usually improve on learning tasks when
they are given meaningful rewards.
The traditional school reward is social re-
inforcement, but several authors (Davis,
1943;
Douvan,
1956;
Ericson,
1947)
have
said that this is not effective for lower-class children.
Laboratory experiments have shown that material reinforcement is more
effective than social reinforcement to produce desired behavior in children (Brack-
bill
&
Lintz,
1967;
Fischer,
1963;
Nickel1
&
Travers,
1963;
Terrell
&
Kennedy,
1957;
Witryol, Tyrell
&
Lowden,
1965)
and that lower-class children are more affected by
material rewards than are middle-class children (Cameron
&
Storm,
1965;
Hoffman,
Mitsos,
&
Protz,
1958;
Terrell, Durkin,
&
Wiesley,
1959).
There is some evidence
from behavior modification research (Whitlock
&
Bushell,
1967;
Wolf, Giles,
&
Hall,
1968)
that token-type reinforcement is effective in the school situation. However,
data largely are lacking that concern the effectiveness of various reinforcers on
groups of children in normal classroom situations.
One classroom experiment (Benowitz
&
Busse,
1970)
did show that lower-
class children performed significantly better on a school task when given a material
reward (box of crayons) than when given the customary social rewards of the class-
room teacher (grade and approval).
The present study tested the effectiveness
of
three incentive conditions across socioeconomic class levels in a real school situation.
The null hypothesis was that the spelling test scores of middle- and lower-SEC
children do not differ whether their incentive is
a
material reward, a social reward,
or when they are informed that they will be given no feedback.
METHOD
Subjects
The
Ss
were fourth-grade children who were attending either of two elementary
schools in small adjoining towns outside a major metropolitan area. Six female
teachers and their classes were involved. Three classes were from
a
middle-SEC
school and three were from
a
lower-SEC school. SEC status was determined by
socioeconomic information collected by school administrators for government
funding.
The socioeconomic status was generally in agreement with the description of
middle- and lower-class groups presented in Warner's
Social Class
in
America
(1960).
The middle-SEC pupils came from average or above-average suburban residential
areas. The houses were well kept and the family income was earned by white-collar
workers. The lower-SEC pupils came from residential areas that were below average,
and in some cases, deteriorating. They lived in older houses and the source of the
family income was usually semiskilled
or
unskilled work. Some of the families were
receiving public welfare.
Complete data were collected from
180
children, and
6
of these were eliminated
randomly to
fit
the experimental design. Fifteen additional pupils were not present
for
all spelling tests. The final sample included
87
middle-SEC and
87
lower-SEC
'The
authors would like
to
thank
Robert
Covert
for
his
assistance
in
this
study.