TOEFL iBT Wriging for an Academic Discussion Rewarding Children to Study (Revised)

The effectiveness of using rewards to motivate children to study is a topic of much discussion. Some argue that providing incentives is a powerful tool to encourage academic effort, while others believe that reliance on rewards can undermine intrinsic motivation. What is your perspective on this issue? Is rewarding children to study a good idea, and why?

 

 

 

☆Let’s Think

1.        What kind of rewards do teachers give to their students?

2.        Do you agree with rewarding children for their efforts and achievements?

 

 

☆Hints for Points

Good

1.       Rewards make learning a game, which encourages children to do tasks and facilitates learning.

2.       Rewards visualize how much students have learned.

3.       Sophisticated teaching materials using rewards help students gain long-term memory. For example, a task to help a character fix an old boat to go home involves math problems and students learn the math concepts they use to solve the problems as they try to get the character to reach the goal.

 

Bad

1.        Rewards may help lose sight of the meaning of studies. Children will lose intrinsic motivation. They will not be motivated in tasks without rewards.

2.        Rewards lose effect soon as students get used to them.

3.        Struggling students would rather be discouraged with rewarding because they always lose.

 

 

☆Sample Response

Good

【Thesis】I think rewarding can be quite effective in learning something by heart not only with children but also with elder students.

【Supporting Details】People tend to remember peripheral information instead of the main subject. It is often the case that students remember trivial details of a class such as footnotes or a teacher’s joke that fell flat. Some people say that they try not to learn anything because that mindset helps them learn better. As more familiar example, it is a common experience that using the same sequence of numbers for a task helps learn it and seeing the same characters multiple times in a game makes the gamer memorize their names. The gamer’s reward is not learning the character names but winning the game, and they don’t necessarily have to know the name of the character in handling them, but their names stay in the gamer’s brain. Very often, the characters, the peripheral information, becomes the center of joy of gaming like PokéMon. Love of details helps people learn.

【Counterargument-treatment & Conclusion】Of course, intrinsic interest in a subject is the real driver of learning and it increases long term memory. However, few students have intrinsic interest in all subjects all the time, and thus we have ABC songs and AN OSUS COMP to make learning fun and easy. Rewards are a factor to motivate learners, and thus teachers use them when they are necessary. (230 words)

 

Bad

【Thesis】Praise from teachers and other students are rewards that correctly recognize the student’s effort in class, and so it is necessary. However, rewards in other forms would be useless.

【Supporting Details】Students should know why they are doing the task for effective learning. If they know the purpose of their studies, leaning itself will be the reward, and rewards like stickers will be like party gifts; it is nice to get them, but you wouldn’t care less even if you don’t as you have enjoyed the party,  learning.

【Counterargument-treatment】Jessica may be right that using rewards is effective with young children who cannot be aware that the study is good to them, and yet, I doubt the effect of teaching young children something that needs rewards to keep their attention or to make them concentrate. Subjects should be interesting to learn in the first place, and people can learn only what they believe they need in the end. If children find learning multiplication table by heart boring, it is because they haven’t been assigned tasks of adding the same number multiple times in 81 patterns. After the task, even the laziest child would find the multiplication table worth learning. Some children might think of using a calculator, but they would cram after experiencing how convenient it is to know the answer in simple multiplication for daily use such as estimating how many brownies are necessary for a gathering.

【Conclusion】In the end, classes that do not rely on rewards are based. (247 words)