Using stickers, not grades, to reward student behavior

Yes, even college students like stickers!

When I read Grading for Equity by Joe Feldman, I woke up to the dual role that grades play in the classroom: grades are (supposed to be) an indicator of student learning, but they also serve as a motivational tool.

In my experience, it’s not enough to tell students that an assignment is designed to help them learn. I tell my students: put effort into this assignment and you’ll be rewarded with better understanding and probably a higher assessment score! But for many students, that logic is not enough to motivate them to do it, not when they have so many other demands on their attention and time. No, for most students, I need to incentivize doing the assignment by assigning it a grade.

But the problem is, now I’m rewarding (and penalizing!) behavior, not evidence of student learning. Consider the following two students:

April receives a 92% average on assessments, completes all the homework

Sharon receives a 92% average on assessments, doesn’t complete most of the homework

By giving the homework a grade, I’m penalizing Sharon for not doing it, even though she demonstrates good understanding on the assessments!¹

What I really want is to incentivize certain behaviors without penalizing students who don’t do them by lowering their grade.

In this post, I describe my Fall 2023 experiment to reward student behavior with stickers instead of grades, including what worked well and what I’ll do differently next time.

The Sticker Chart & Treasure Chest

At the beginning of my community college Introductory Biology course, I gave each student a blank sticker chart. (You can see an example completed sticker chart above.)

For each behavior I wanted to incentivize, there was a spot for a sticker on the chart. Every time a student completed the behavior, they got a sticker. For example, there were spots for completing all the homework assignments in one month, for attending one science seminar, and for using one of our institutional resources, like the library, counseling, the food pantry, etc. (I was especially excited about incentivizing behaviors that are often stigmatized, like going to tutoring or counseling!)

For every 3 stickers that students earned, they got to pick one item from a treasure box.

For my treasure box (see below), I spent $68 on Amazon for fidget toys, goofy pens, and high-quality science-related stickers. (The $68 also included the reward stickers I used for the sticker chart.)

In addition to all these rewards, I also included in the treasure box “Late Work Anytime Tokens².” My Late Work policy included giving all students 10 “Deadline Extension Tokens” at the beginning of the semester that they could use to turn in almost any assignment late. But if they turned in one assignment 3 days late, they needed to use 3 Deadline Extension Tokens. Thus, if they waited more than a day or two to turn in an assignment, they quickly burned through Deadline Extension tokens.

However, each “Late Work Anytime Token” allowed the student to turn in one assignment anytime until the end of the semester. That made them extremely valuable.

Late Work Anytime Tokens were, by far, the most popular item in the treasure chest. I didn’t keep track, but I’m guessing about 2/3 of the treasures that students chose from the treasure chest were Late Work Anytime tokens. (Which is cool, because they were free for me!)

Did it work?

Yes! Although not all the students were motivated by stickers, many were! Half of the students turned in their sticker chart at the end of the semester³, and of those, the average number of stickers earned was 7.

For those students who were actively collecting stickers, it was clear that they were motivated by the stickers. They took selfies when they used institutional resources; they attended science seminars they wouldn’t have otherwise attended; and they worked hard to complete homework streaks so they could earn stickers.

So yes, for a majority of the students, I do think the sticker system helped motivate certain behaviors.

Logistics, if you want to use stickers too

First, handing out stickers was a little disruptive, and I don’t think my method would scale well for larger classes. (I had 17 students.)

The actual act of giving out stickers happened informally, usually before or after class. With the exception of homework streaks, students would approach me and ask for a sticker because they did X thing on the chart. Most of the time, they needed to show me a selfie to prove that they earned the sticker.

Although the sticker-handing-out process was not complicated, it was surprisingly disruptive. The student had to get their sticker chart out of their notebook; I had to retrieve my stickers from my bag; I had to confirm that their selfie showed what they said it showed; and I had to put the sticker on the right square (surprisingly tough when you’re in a rush, don’t laugh).

I did all of this either before class (when I was inevitably rushing to try to get everything set up for class) or after class (when other students were inevitably waiting to talk to me about something else). It almost always felt rushed and chaotic, especially when more than one student wanted a sticker on a given day.

It was easier to hand out stickers for the Homework Streak boxes, because I knew before class who had earned stickers (based on completion of homework on the LMS). During class, because I already had a list of students who needed stickers for the homework streak, I could hand out stickers while the students were completing an active learning activity. It was minimally disruptive and easy to implement.

So, next semester I’m planning to create an assignment on my LMS where students can submit their selfies before class, so I can sidestep the whole “show me your selfie” process and I can know at the start of class who needs stickers and for what.

Second, you are welcome to use and adapt my sticker chart template, which is available under the Resources page on my website. The file format is Adobe Illustrator .ai.

Third, it’s possible that you don’t need a treasure box at all for the stickers to be motivational. I don’t know about you, but I get really excited about getting my “I voted!” sticker, no treasure box necessary. And others attest to the motivational power of stickers as classroom rewards, even in college classrooms. So maybe stickers alone are sufficient. But I’m going to keep using my treasure box because 1) I’ve already purchased all those fidget toys! and 2) students seemed really motivated by the Late Work Anytime Tokens.

At the end of the semester, when I asked my students f I should keep using the sticker chart, the resounding answer was YES! So I’ll keep doing it. Your students might appreciate it, too.

1. This dichotomy between whether to incentivize completion of assignments by grading it but worrying about penalizing students who don’t do it is why I use Multiple Grading Schemes (more: blog, YouTube video).

2. My late work “tokens” are not real, physical things. Instead, I keep track of student “tokens” using an assignment on our LMS where I update the number manually as students use or earn tokens.

3. More than half of the students in the class collected stickers, but some students lost their sticker chart or were not present on the day they turned them in.