Two young children sit together on the floor, examining a wrapped gift between them.

Should Reading Come With Rewards? What the Research Says About Books as Incentives

The sticker chart worked for a while — finish a book, get a star, five stars gets a small toy. Then your child started asking "what do I get?" before opening anything, and now you're wondering if the whole system was a mistake. It's a reasonable thing to wonder, and the research actually has a fairly specific answer, not just a flat yes or no.

The core finding: what the reward is matters more than whether there's a reward

A 2008 study by Barbara Marinak and Linda Gambrell, published in Literacy Research and Instruction, gave young children a reading task and then rewarded them in different ways — with a book, with a token unrelated to reading, or with nothing. The children who were rewarded with a book stayed more motivated to keep reading afterward than those who received a generic token reward. The researchers described this as a "reward proximity" effect: a reward that's closely tied to the activity itself — a book for reading, extra reading time, a say in what to read next — behaved very differently from a prize that has nothing to do with reading, like a toy or sticker.

The bigger picture: the real risk is in what you're rewarding, and how

This fits a larger and much-debated body of work. A 2001 meta-analysis of 128 experiments by Edward Deci, Richard Koestner and Richard Ryan, published in the Review of Educational Research, found that tangible rewards tied to completing a task can measurably reduce a person's own interest in that task afterward — and the effect was larger in children than in adults. But the same analysis found an important exception: rewards that weren't contingent on actually finishing or performing the task didn't carry the same risk. In plain terms, the danger isn't reward itself, but making a child feel reading is a chore to be paid off rather than something worth doing on its own.

Where it's genuinely uncertain

This is one of psychology's longer-running disagreements. Other researchers, notably Judy Cameron and colleagues, have argued the undermining effect shown in lab studies is often smaller or absent in real classrooms, where rewards are used occasionally rather than constantly and aren't the only reason a child is reading. Nobody is claiming an occasional reward will ruin a child's relationship with books. The more honest summary is: a heavy, constant system of unrelated prizes for reading carries some real risk to long-term motivation, while an occasional reward — especially a reading-related one — appears far safer, and the research doesn't settle exactly where that line sits for every child.

What this means this week

  • If you already use a reward system, shift the reward toward reading itself tonight — a new book, a later bedtime for one more chapter, or choosing the next book — rather than toys, screen time or sweets.
  • Use rewards for trying something new, not for finishing what they'd read anyway. That's closer to the "task-noncontingent" rewards the research treats as low-risk.
  • Don't panic and cancel a sticker chart that's working. An occasional, mild incentive isn't the same as the heavy, constant systems the strongest warnings are about.
  • Narrate the enjoyment out loud sometimes — "that was a fun one, wasn't it?" — so reading gets associated with the story itself, not only with what comes after.

Sources

Marinak, B. A., & Gambrell, L. B. (2008). Intrinsic motivation and rewards: What sustains young children's engagement with text? Literacy Research and Instruction, 47(1), 9–26.

Deci, E. L., Koestner, R., & Ryan, R. M. (2001). Extrinsic rewards and intrinsic motivation in education: Reconsidered once again. Review of Educational Research, 71(1), 1–27.

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