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Dr Paul Howard-Jones Reader in Neuroscience and Education
University of Bristol
Rewards
One of the ways in which teachers often try to engage their students is by offering rewards
and those rewards can be gold stars; but they can also be social rewards, such as you know,
"Well done", "You're doing fantastically". We find that all of these sorts of rewards
tend to stimulate some of the same regions of the reward system in the brain. Unfortunately,
from the behavioural evidence it's very difficult to find a relationship between the rewards
that you offer in the classroom and the extensive learning that is generated as a result. What
we are learning from the neuroscience is that the brain's response to the reward does predict
the learning that's achieved. And therefore increasingly, I think educators need to think
about how the brain responds to reward in the classroom and when they start thinking
about that, all sorts of strategies come to mind that are going to be able to stimulate
the student's reward system more, and that stimulation of the rewards system doesn't
just engage them more, we know it also accelerates the rate as which connections are made in
the cortex. And one of the most interesting ways in which you can get a greater stimulation
of the rewards system is through offering uncertain reward. Uncertain reward -- in other
words rewards that are mediated by chance -- so you're not just offering points but
you're actually offering the chance of winning points; that seems to increase the dopamine
uptake in the rewards system and we know that that improves motivation and that is also
improves the rate at which we learn. And mediating the relationship between ability and outcome
with chance is actually like turning a lesson into a game, so this provides a learning-games
approach to teaching in the classroom.