Small rewards are all that’s necessary to motivate children to learn more, researchers found after a pilot study in four New York City schools. Students who were rewarded with the equivalent of 75 cents in today’s money for learning more spelling words learned to spell better than children who did not receive rewards, although the magnitude of the gains was not reported. Still, researchers cautioned that these results should not be applied too broadly until more research on motivation had been done:
When was this groundbreaking research done? Guess the year — and no googling!