i literally love when people realize positive reinforcement works like yes its so silly isnt it. but it literally works humans love juice reward too
Back in grad school I TA'd a couple 400 level courses on stone tool production and zooarchaeology that involved a lot of technical memorization that required the students to learn complex terminology very quickly. They were two of the only such undergrad courses the program had (I think the third was Mesoamerican Pottery, and there was a grad course on Human Osteology), so none of them would have encountered much if any of this info in the two years since their first intro courses. There were over a dozen quizzes in each course, nearly one a week, and the grades were known to be abysmally low compared to the lab reports because of how much time you needed to spend in the lab handling the material in order to study for it.
I like being paid to have fun, so I bought some Transformers stickers and put one on every quiz that got over 90% (ie. the 'A' range). Any quiz that got an A+ got Optimus Prime himself. B grades still got a "good job!!" and any passing grade at all got a smiley face, but no sticker.
Y'all, 4th year arky courses are FULL of nerds. The MINUTE the first quizzes were handed back they went nuts over the stickers. There were stars in their eyes, they were crowing in excitement. These were students in their mid-twenties. Only one person got an Optimus Prime on that quiz, and when I told them the sticker rubrick and the requirements to get Optimus you could practically see the fire it lit. They would get those stickers. Optimus Prime was going to be theirs.
I fucking ran out of stickers TWICE throughout those courses. I had to go and buy whole packs JUST TO HAVE ENOUGH OPTIMUSES (Optimi?) for all the A+ quizzes that came in every time. That meant i had more generic TF stickers to promote the B grade papers to stickerdom. The materials lab was full of students every week, studying for these quizzes. They hyped each other up for them. They petitioned me to sticker their lab reports and final projects too (of course I did).
The prof, a delightful 80-something socks-and-sandals hippy of a guy who supervised my honours thesis, was fucking beside himself over this. He thought it was the best thing ever. He joked that the marks that semester were so abnormally high that he needed to look over the tests himself in case I was going too easy on them (I wasn't, those TF stickers were expensive). He had to look over them anyway in case *I* made a technical mistake grading them, which meant he was the first to see the stickers each time XD
Anyway, it's true. I've yet to meet an adult who didn't enjoy a sparkly sticker reward.
