In education psychology, at least at the introductory level that I've been exposed to, there is a distinction drawn between intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation.
Intrinsic motivation is supposed to be motivatation that arises from "desire to learn" type impulses, the inherent rewards of figuring things out, that type of thing. It's generally characterized as "good" motivation.
Extrinsic motivation is motivation that arises from outside, like offers of rewards (typically, candy, it seems, if you're teaching English in Korea), etc. It is sometimes characterized as less effective.
I've always been uncomfortable with the distiction – while still nevertheless not entirely comfortable with giving extrinsic rewards to students, either.
Yesterday I had an amazing afterschool class with my third graders, that brought to the fore my discomfort with these categorizations of motivation and their typical characterizations.
As some of you know, I've been experimenting with building a "classroom economy." It's based on a town, which is currently attached to a bunch of poster-boards that I assemble for each class, lacking a permanent "home classroom" in which to operate. I'll add some pictures, sometime (I took a lot of the one we made on a bulletin board, over the summer, but have neglected picture-taking since the fall term started).
The town has land and money and salaries and buying and selling. Things like that. It's pretty simplistic, for the third graders, but they really love it. And yesterday, I did an experiment. I wanted to do a lesson where we could practice "giving directions": "go straight"; "turn left"; "stop; etc.
I told the kids that we would practice for a while, and then we would have a race. But not like a physical race. They had to give ME directions, while I was "driving" a little paper car around the town. The kids would get flustered, and say "go left" when they meant "go right," and I would immediately drive the little paper car off a cliff or a bridge and making exaggerated crashing noises. But it was all about preparing for the "race" – because I had promised a prize purse to the winner. The winner of this race was going to get a thousand dollars. That was substantial cash in the scale of the classroom economy. Every single student was BEGGING to practice, for this race (which will occur next class).
So my philosophical question: was this extrinsic motivation? Or intrinsic? What was going on, psychologically? They wanted to win the money. That's considered extrinsic. But the money is just play money, and it's limited to inside the classroom economy. And they really seemed to be having fun, too, making my car crash as they gave me directions, and trying to find the location I'd told them to give me directions to. It seemed really intrinsic.
I don't know the answer. I'm posing a question.