Rizal Technological University

Cities of Mandaluyong and Pasig

College of Arts and Science

Department of Psychology

I. Title: Motivation: The Influence of Reward System towards

Goal, Learning and Performance of the Students.

II. Operating Details

A. Materials

 38 copies of survey forms for pre-assessment

 38 copies of survey forms for post-assessment
 5 sets of 150 piece jigsaw puzzle
 One thousand pesos for the main reward
 Another one thousand pesos for the prizes

B. Time

 20 minutes for the pre-assessment

 20 minutes to accomplish the puzzle
 3 minutes to answer every question
 20 minutes post –test
 10 minutes explanations of experiment

C. Venue

 RND Building (6th floor)

  Laboratory Room
 Observation Room

D. Participants

 38 students of CAS-06-302A

III. Procedures

1) Participants will answer set of questions (pre-test) to assess

their self as a part of a group and also, their performance on

their previous group activities in school. The main goal of this

assessment is to know how cooperative they are in their

previous group activities base on their goals, expectation in

terms of reward whether it is intrinsic or extrinsic motivation, and

learning.

2) Participants will be divided into (2) two groups, which are

Controlled group and Uncontrolled group; each group will be

composing of 19 students. These groups will be given the same

task to be accomplished as fast as they can.

3) The Uncontrolled group will take an experiment first to save

space and also to prevent them on sharing informations about

the task. On the other hand, the Controlled group will be left in

the Lecture Room to undergo some briefing. In the briefing we

are going to inform them that the group who finish first will

receive one thousand pesos as a reward. At this part of the

 experiment we will be measuring the engagement of the

Controlled group in the task based on the reward.

4) The experiment will compose of two stations; first station is

located at the corridor. It has a 5 jigsaw puzzle that needs to be

solved in a given time. Once the given time is over, the group

participants will be asked if they will going to continue the task

or not regardless if they finished the first station successfully.

5) If the group participants continue to take the task they will

proceed on the last station which contains five sets of questions

or trivias. The second station only requires the group to answer

at least one question to finish the whole task but there will be a

twist, in every question that answered correctly, they will be

given two hundred pesos and it is up to the group if they will

answer more questions to get another two hundred pesos on

each questions.
6) If the group participant has decided to not proceed to the

second station, they will precede to the last part of the

experiment which they'll need to answer a post-test. These sets

of questions will be given after the whole task to re-assess their

self after the activity.

IV. Reports to be Submitted and Attachments

 Motivation is anything that inspires one to do something. It may be defined

as psychological forces that determine the direction of a person's behavior in an

organization, a person's level of effort and a person's level of persistence in the

face of obstacles. People are motivated to do activities by many different factors.

Each person is prompted by various influences to complete what they vision to

fulfill. For this paper, we will discuss what motivates a person to finish what we

set out to do. The main factors that are involved are setting a goal, motivation as

learning, competition and the expectancy of achieving reward.

In 1960’s, Edwin Locke propose the Goal-setting theory of motivation. This

theory states that goal setting is fundamentally associated to task performance. It

states that specific and challenging goals with suitable feedback put in to higher

and better task performance. According to Thompson (2007) Goal commitment is

the amount of determination a person will use to achieve an accepted goal, and

there are two main factors that determine it: importance and self-efficacy. The

reasons a person has for attaining a goal includes expecting certain outcomes.

A person’s belief that he or she can achieve a goal is self-efficacy. If you

commit to a goal, your performance will always be higher. A goal is meant to

present a challenge to an individual, but it should still be attainable. A person can

increase their motivation depending on the level of challenge. The more

challenging a goal is, the more focused you become on the task and the easier it
is to avoid unnecessary distractions. You will be energized to work harder toward

the difficult goal. (Osborne, 2015)

In the literature of achievement goals, for example, people study primarily

for two different goals which are to master materials and develop their

competence, they are called mastery goals, and to perform well in comparison to

others, which are called performance goals (Dweck, 1986; Nicholls, 1984).

Mastery goals and performance goals represent the same overall quantity of

motivation, but they are qualitatively distinct types of motivation. We will conduct

a series of behavioral experiments to examine how these two different types of

motivation influence learning.

In the study, participants will be engage in a problem-solving task and

receive a surprise memory test related to the task. Critically, participants

performed the problem-solving task with different goals. Participants in the

mastery goal condition will told that the goal is to develop their cognitive ability

through the task, whereas those in the performance goal condition are told that

their goal is to demonstrate their ability relative to other participants. According to

recent findings in cognitive neuroscience, the answer seems to be yes. Indeed,

there have been a number of studies, including ours (Murayama & Kitagami,

2014), that have shown that rewards (e.g., money) enhance learning due to the

modulation of hippocampal function by the reward network in the brain (Adcock,

Thangavel, Whitfield-Gabrielli, Knutson & Gabrieli, 2006). On this basis, some

argue for the value of reward in education (Howard-Jones & Jay, 2016).
 But research in social psychology has also found that extrinsic rewards

can sometimes undermine intrinsic motivation when people are engaged in an

interesting task. This phenomenon called the undermining effect or over

justification effect (Deci, Koestner & Ryan, 1999; Lepper, Greene & Nisbett,

1973), suggests that extrinsic rewards are not always beneficial for learning.

In our society, it is common for authority figures to introduce competition

as a means to increase people’s motivation and performance. When in a

competition, we adopt two different types of motivational goals: performance-

approach goals and performance-avoidance goals (Elliot & Harackiewicz, 1996).

Performance-approach goals are goals that focus on positive outcomes of the

competition (“My goal is to outperform others”) whereas performance-avoidance

goals focus on negative outcomes (“My goal is not to do worse than others”).

Importantly, previous research has shown that performance-approach goals

positively predict task performance whereas performance-avoidance goals

negatively predict performance (Elliot & Church, 1997).

We will examine whether the competition triggers both performance-

approach and performance-avoidance goals, and that these goals cancel each

other out because they have opposing effects, producing a weak effect. We will

test this “opposing processes model of competition and performance” with an

additional meta-analysis, longitudinal surveys, and a behavioral experiment,

providing strong support for the model. These results indicate that competition

engages multi-faceted motivational processes, which explains why the

introduction of competition does not consistently bring motivational benefits

( Murayama & Elliot, 2009).

Whereas Maslow and Herzberg look at the relationship between internal

needs and the resulting effort expended to fulfil them, Vroom's expectancy theory

separates effort which arises from motivation, performance, and outcomes.

Vroom's expectancy theory assumes that behavior results from conscious

choices among alternatives whose purpose it is to maximize pleasure and to

minimize pain. Vroom realized that an employee's performance is based on

individual factors such as personality, skills, knowledge, experience and abilities.

He stated that effort, performance and motivation are linked in a person's

motivation. He uses the variables Expectancy, Instrumentality and Valence to

account for this.

Crucially, Vroom's expectancy theory works on perceptions – so even if an

employer thinks they have provided everything appropriate for motivation, and

even if this works with most people in that organization, it doesn't mean that

someone won't perceive that it doesn't work for them.

At first glance expectancy theory would seem most applicable to a

traditional-attitude work situation where how motivated the employee is depends

on whether they want the reward on offer for doing a good job and whether they

believe more effort will lead to that reward.

However, it could equally apply to any situation where someone does

something because they expect a certain outcome. For example, I recycle paper
because I think it's important to conserve resources and take a stand on

environmental issues. I think that the more effort I put into recycling the more

paper I will recycle expectancy; and I think that the more paper I recycle then

less resources will be used instrumentality

Thus, Vroom's expectancy theory of motivation is not about self-interest in

rewards but about the associations people make towards expected outcomes

and the contribution they feel they can make towards those outcomes. (Braver et

al., 2014)

References:

Adcock, R.A., Thangavel, A., Whitfield-Gabrieli, S., Knutson, B., & Gabrieli,

J.D.E. (2006). Reward-motivated learning: Mesolimbic activation precedes

memory formation. Neuron, 50(3), 507-517.

Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change.

Educational Psychology Review, 84, 191-215.

Braver, T.S., Krug, M.K., Chiew, K.S., Kool, W., Clement, N.J., Adcock, A., Barch,

D.M., Botvinick, M.M., Carver, C.S., Cols, R., Custers, R., Dickinson,
 A.R., Dweck, C.S., Fishbach, A., Gollwitzer, P.M., Hess, T.M., Isaacowitz,

D.M., Mather, M., Murayama, K., Pessoa, L., Samanez-Larkin, G.R., &

Somerville, L.H. (2014). Mechanisms of motivation-cognition interaction:

Challenges and opportunities. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral

Neuroscience, 14, 443-472.

Burgess, L., Riddell, P., Fancourt, A., & Murayama, K. (under review).

The influence of social contagion within education: A review.

Deci, E.L., Koestner, R., & Ryan, R.M. (1999). A meta-analytic review of

experiments examining the effects of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic

motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 125, 627-668.

Dweck, C.S. (1986). Motivational process affects learning. American

Psychologist, 41, 1010-1018.

Elliot, A.J., & Church, M.A. (1997). A hierarchical model of approach and

avoidance achievement motivation. Journal of Personality and Social

Psychology, 72, 218-232.

Elliot, A.J., & Harackiewicz, J.M. (1996). Approach and avoidance achievement

goals and intrinsic motivation: A mediational analysis. Journal of

 Personality and Social Psychology, 70, 461-475.

Fastrich, G.M., Kerr, T., Castel, A.D., & Murayama, K. (in press). The role of

interest in memory for trivia questions: An investigation with a large-scale

database. Motivation Science.

Howard-Jones, P. & Jay, T. (2016). Reward, learning and games. Current

Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 10, 65-72.

Prepared by:
Gerald De Arco

Jyanne Khristine Ilagan

Camille Joy Nicolas

Remcy Padilla

Alfred Dave Silva