Monitoring-Based Rewards Enhance Both Learning Performance and Metacognitive Monitoring Accuracy

Abstract

Utilization of monetary rewards in educational settings remains contentious due to its potential adverse effects such as performance-related anxiety, metacognitive inaccuracy, and diminished intrinsic motivation. The current study developed a novel reward-based learning paradigm wherein rewards are granted based on monitoring accuracy rather than learning performance. Specifically, learners receive rewards for items that they predict they will remember and subsequently successfully remember them during the final test. Two experiments were conducted to assess the efficacy of this paradigm: Experiment 1 focused on learning Chinese medicine images, while Experiment 2 examined the transfer of math knowledge in classroom settings. The results indicated that rewarding the alignment between performance and metacognitive accuracy improved learning performance compared to both a baseline group and a group receiving performance-based rewards. Furthermore, this paradigm effectively mitigated performance-related anxiety and preserved intrinsic motivation. Overall, our findings highlight the critical role of reward-based learning design and emphasize the importance of addressing metacognitive accuracy alongside performance in educational practice.