March 2007 Close the Book on ‘Book It!’ By Alfie Kohn I once asked the late John Nicholls, an expert on motivation and achievement, for his assessment of Pizza Hut’s “Book It!” program, which uses fast food as a reward for reading. Nicholls dryly observed that the most likely result would be “a lot of fat kids who don’t like … Read More
A Closer Look at Reading Incentive Programs
Excerpts from Punished by Rewards (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993/1999/2018) A Closer Look at Reading Incentive Programs By Alfie Kohn All those reading incentive campaigns inflicted on elementary school children across the country provide sobering evidence of just how many parents and educators are trapped by Skinnerian thinking. They also illustrate the consequences of extrinsic motivators more generally. Asked about the likely … Read More