Joan F. Goodman recommends Punished by Rewards

Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes by Alfie Kohn (Houghton Mifflin, 1993). 

In 1993, as educational pundits were beginning to espouse the superiority of positive reinforcement to punishment for disciplining and motivating students, Alfie Kohn’s Punished by Rewards loudly proclaimed the ill effects of both. Praising and rewarding children for their work, he claimed, was as deleterious as older child-berating methods. Both sapped students of engagement in learning. In lucid, well-researched prose, Kohn’s message, as relevant today as then, was that rewards draw students to the grade they will earn — “what do I have to know for the test?” — not what they can learn. Desire for approval inevitably dampens curiosity, imagination, and independent analysis; students become passive, anxious, and competitive. 

Beyond illustrating the limited value of praise, Kohn offers specific alternatives. Among them: a de-emphasis on grades, genuine individualized feedback, choice, collaborative projects, and curricular input from students. While a reader may find some of the ideas unrealistic for today’s schools, dominated as they are by big classes and mandatory test preparation, Kohn lays out an aspirational world in which teachers and students are deeply engaged rather than bored and alienated.