IB Psychology HLTopic 7 — MotivationHuman DevelopmentHL extension~8 min read
Motivation as Children Grow Up
A sticker will get a four-year-old to tidy an entire room. Try it on a fifteen-year-old and you will get a look you remember for a week. Motivation does not stay still as people develop, and the IB wants you to be able to explain why.
📘 What you need to know
Praise is a response that follows a behaviour, and it can act as positive reinforcement — it makes the behaviour more likely to be repeated.
Praise also feeds the self-schema: the beliefs a child builds about the kind of person they are.
Praise only works if it feels genuine and earned. Praise given to everyone for everything stops carrying information.
Children get better at detecting empty praise as they get older, so the same reward loses power with age.
By adolescence, praise can even reduce motivation if it feels patronising or controlling.
Motivation is therefore developmental: what motivates depends on age, not just on the person.
Praise as reinforcement
Start with the simple mechanism. A child tidies up, an adult says “that was really helpful”, and the child feels good. The good feeling follows the behaviour, so the behaviour becomes more likely next time. That is positive reinforcement, straight from the behaviourist account of motivation in Topic 7.1.
But praise does something a sweet or a sticker cannot. It carries a message about the child. “You worked hard at that” tells them they are a person who works hard. Repeated often enough, that message gets folded into their self-schema, and children act in ways that fit the person they believe they are.
The cycle is the reason praise matters developmentally: it is not one reward, it is a long chain of small messages about who the child is.
Why the same praise stops working
Children are much better judges of praise than adults expect. A medal handed to everybody who turned up at sports day tells a seven-year-old nothing, and they know it. Praise carries information only when it could have been withheld.
That is why competition can be motivating for older children in a way it is not for toddlers. A prize that was earned says something real, especially if the team was not expected to win. A prize that everyone gets says nothing at all.
A useful line for an essay: motivation research often treats age as background noise, when it is really one of the variables.
Teenagers are not being difficult when praise annoys them. Adolescence is partly about proving you are your own person, so praise that sounds like an adult grading you can feel like control — and control is the enemy of intrinsic motivation.
Why this is hard to study
Everything above sounds sensible. Proving it is another matter, and the difficulties are worth marks:
Praise is not one thing. Verbal praise, a hug, a certificate and a public mention are all “praise” and they do not act the same way.
Sincerity cannot be measured. The same words land differently depending on who says them and how.
The tipping point is invisible. Praise moves from motivating to meaningless at some point, and that point differs from child to child.
Individual differences. A shy child and a confident child can react to identical praise in opposite directions.
Age and experience are tangled together. An older child has had more praise, so you cannot separate maturity from history.
Worked example
WORKED EXAMPLE
To what extent is praise a good motivator if it is used in moderation? [15 marks]
Below is a paragraph plan plus one written paragraph, so you can see the depth an ERQ needs.
Plan
1 Define praise and positive reinforcement. 2 FOR: praise reinforces and builds self-schema. 3 AGAINST: overused praise loses meaning; praise can control. 4 Age changes the picture. 5 Measurement problems. 6 Judgement on “in moderation”.
Written paragraph — why moderation is the key word
Praise works because it carries information, and information depends on scarcity. If every child in a class is praised in the same way regardless of what they did, the praise no longer distinguishes anything, so it cannot reinforce a particular behaviour. Children are quick to notice this: a medal for attending sports day is treated very differently from one that had to be won. Used sparingly, praise tells a child which behaviour mattered; used constantly, it becomes background noise.
Judgement
Praise is a good motivator when it is genuine, specific and earned. “Moderation” is close to right, but the better term is informative — frequency matters less than whether the praise tells the child something true.
Takes a position and improves the question’s wordingRefining the term in the question is a top-band move, as long as you still answer the question asked.
💡 Exam tip
Give a concrete example for every claim. “A medal just for turning up” does more work than a paragraph of theory.
Bring age into any Human Development answer explicitly — it is the whole point of the context.
Link praise to reinforcement and to self-schema. Two mechanisms is better than one.
Keep a measurement problem in reserve. Praise, sincerity and motivation are all hard to operationalise.
Culture belongs here too: how much adult approval matters, and for how long, is not the same everywhere.
⚠ Common mix-up
“Praise is always good.” Insincere praise, or praise that feels controlling, can reduce motivation.
Treating praise as identical to a reward. Praise carries a message about the person; a sticker mostly does not.
Assuming all children respond the same way. Age, temperament and culture all change the effect.
Confusing self-esteem with motivation. Feeling good about yourself does not automatically make you act.
Forgetting the development angle and writing a general essay about rewards. The context is half the marks.
Up next: How Praise Changes a Child’s Motivation — the sharpest finding in this whole context: praising ability and praising effort produce two different kinds of learner.
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