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Positive or Pernicious?
School is out for most kids, and that can mean only one thing for librarians - summer reading program! Children's librarians across the nation have spent months planning activities, booking performers, and purchasing reading logs, bookmarks, and incentives to motivate children to read during the summer to maintain their ability and to help them develop a love of reading for its own sake.
Although few librarians seem to question the value of incentives in reaching these goals, the practice is not without its critics. In 1956, both Frank G. Jennings and Mary Gaboda summarized the results of a survey of children's librarians attitudes toward reading incentives that had been published in the October 15 issue of Junior Libraries.1
Jennings, the executive director of the Library Club of America, spoke for those who supported the use of tangible rewards as being necessary to compete with the lure of television and to "persuade children into the habit of reading."2
Arguing against reading incentives, Gaboda, Grosse Point (Michigan) Public Library children's librarian, wrote that "reward-type incentives" shifted children's goals from "enjoying a reading experience to the winning of a contest," and that such "extrinsic motivation undermines integrity and encourages dependence on lures and irrelevant rewards."3
Thirty years later, Carol-Ann Haycock and Jo-Anne Westerby each wondered whether what Haycock calls the "quantitative competitive approach" taken by most library Summer Reading Programs promote, as Westerby puts it, "competition and love of winning or love of reading," suggesting that "we are losing sight of the real goal-that of reading as opposed to record breaking."4
In 1999, Douglohnson, Director of Media and Technology at I.S.D. 77 in Mankato (Minnesota) Public Schools, suggested that giving rewards for reading was "creating fat kids who don't like to read." He based his conclusion on the 1993 book, Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, As, Praise, and Other Bribes, in which author Alfie Kohn contends that "extrinsic motivation not only doesn't achieve long-term desired behaviors but actually works against building those very habits and attitudes," including an intrinsic love of reading.5
As far as I can determine, no one has ever studied the effect of such incentives on children's performance in the Summer Reading Program or on their...