Student and Teacher Perceptions Regarding Incentives in the Classroom

Incentives, which are a behavior management tool, have long existed in education as a way to motivate students to display targeted behaviors and achieve academic goals. This action research study, which was conducted in a first-grade classroom, had the purpose of understanding students’ and the teacher’s perceptions of incentives in the classroom. Through collecting surveys, interviewing the students and the classroom teacher, taking field notes, and collecting artifacts, qualitative data was analyzed to find common themes that emerged, while quantitative data from the surveys was calculated to find the mean. The researcher found that the students and classroom teacher had positive perceptions of incentives. The classroom teacher recommended the utilization of incentives because of how effective it was as a behavior management tool. Students appreciated fuzzies because of the rewards that they could exchange their tokens for.