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Reinforcement Practicality For Middle School Students: A Meta-Analysis, Kelly C. Dreger Ed.D., Steve Downey Ph.D.

Journal of Inquiry and Action in Education

The need for evolving support interventions that can help students in a wide range of settings is an ongoing requirement for middle schools today. Token reinforcement, which is a form of extrinsic motivation and incentivization, is studied within this meta-analysis to determine if significant treatment effects exist overall and if there are studies that show more gains than others. Most studies report significant positive gains individually, but the statistical significance is lost when the studies are reviewed as a whole. Variables such as sample size requirements, treatment effect variation, and session time all influence treatment effect size. Reinforcement has been …