Rewarding Results or Rewarding Efforts?

Abstract The main objective of teaching is to make sure that the students learn the required material. From this viewpoint, it seems reasonable to reward students when they learn this material. In other words, it seems reasonable to assign the student’s rewards (such as grades) based on their level of knowledge. However, experiments show that, contrary to this seemingly intuitive conclusion, we achieve much better results if we base rewards not only on the students’ results, but also on the student’s efforts. In this paper, we use the known fact about optimal control to explain this seemingly counterintuitive phenomenon.