The Rewards and Sanctions Cross-school Research Group, on behalf of the Norwich Area Schools Consortium, set out to investigate if formalised systems for motivating and penalising students helped to engage them in learning. Our research may be of interest to teachers in other schools who are considering reviewing their own systems for rewarding and sanctioning students.

We reviewed the research literature and devised research questions around whole school policies and students’ and teachers’ perceptions of the affect of rewards and sanctions on behaviour and motivation.

Our sample of six secondary schools and one residential school for students with emotional and behavioural difficulties gave us a range of schools with different characteristics and a large sample of around 750 students aged 12 to 15. The survey of students and teachers took place between April and June 2000.

Our findings about students’ and teachers’ perspectives and schools are of interest on two counts.

• Firstly we were able to form some views about what the majority of students from the whole sample thought about rewards and sanctions. So we are able to offer some insight for instance into what girls or boys, or students of different ages thought.
  
• Secondly we were able to compare the responses of students and teachers, and the systems used in the seven schools. These findings helped show what worked and what did not and to some extent the part played by the schools’ systems and how teachers put the systems into practice.

To begin exploring our research we invite you to checkout your own perceptions about formal systems of rewards and sanctions from your own experience. This takes the form of a questionnaire that has links to our main findings, data collection instruments and extracts from our data sets.

your views of schools’ systems of rewards and sanctions