Should You Reward Effort or Results? A Teacher Settles the Debate

A boy in my third grade class once turned in a math page with every answer wrong and a note at the bottom that said "I tryed my best." I'd been so busy praising effort that year that he genuinely believed trying hard was the finish line. That was the day I started rethinking the whole reward-effort-or-results question, because clearly I'd broken something with good intentions.

Here's the honest answer after fifteen years of watching it play out. Reward effort or results and you'll get a lopsided kid either way. The real target is the thing in the middle that most people skip, and I'll get to it. But first you have to see what each pure version actually does.

What rewarding results really teaches

Praise the score and you get a fast, clear message. Right answers earn the good stuff. Wrong answers don't.

For a kid who finds the material easy, this feels great and costs nothing. They ace the quiz, they get the sticker, everyone's happy. The problem shows up in two places.

First, the kid who's genuinely struggling. If only results get rewarded, the child who worked for an hour and still got a C learns that their effort is worthless. So they stop trying. Why grind if the grind never pays? I've watched capable kids quit math entirely because the only currency in the room was the final number.

Second, and this one's sneaky, the kids who find it easy get addicted to looking smart. They stop taking on anything hard because a wrong answer now threatens their whole identity. They pick the easy book, the safe problem, the assignment they already know they'll ace. Results-only praise makes strong students fragile.

What rewarding effort really teaches

So praise effort instead, right? That's the fix everyone's heard. And it's better. But my "I tryed my best" note is what happens when you take it too far.

If effort is the only thing that earns praise, and effort earns it regardless of whether the kid learned anything, then trying becomes the goal. Not understanding. Not getting better. Just visibly trying. Kids are smart. They'll perform effort. They'll furrow their brow and chew the pencil and put in the show, because that's what gets rewarded, and never actually check whether their method works.

Effort without results is just spinning your wheels. And a kid who's praised for spinning learns to spin harder, not to steer.

The thing in the middle: reward progress

Here's what I landed on, and what I'd tell any parent asking whether to reward effort or results. You reward progress. Specifically, you reward effort that produced a change.

The magic word in my classroom became "better." Not "you're so smart" and not "you tried so hard," but "this is better than last time, and here's the part that got better."

• A kid who missed six problems last week and misses three this week made progress. That's real, and it's worth celebrating out loud.
• A kid who was skip-counting on fingers and now does it in her head made progress, even if the final answers were the same.
• A kid who tried a new strategy and it worked made progress, and I name the strategy so they know what to repeat.

This threads the needle. It honors the effort, because progress takes effort. But it demands that the effort actually connected to something, so it doesn't reward empty spinning. And it never punishes the struggler, because a kid who's behind can still get better than they were yesterday, which is the only fair yardstick anyway.

What this looks like at your kitchen table

You don't need a system. You need to change what you notice out loud.

Instead of "great job, you got them all right," try "you got that whole row of subtraction without counting on your fingers, that's new." You're still celebrating. You're just pointing the spotlight at the growth, not the grade.

Instead of "I love how hard you're working," which can float free of any result, try "you kept going after that hard one and you figured it out, that's the part that matters." The effort and the payoff are named together, so the kid learns the connection.

And when the effort truly didn't produce a result yet, don't fake it. Say the true thing: "That didn't work this time, but you found out it doesn't work, so now we try a different way." That's not a consolation prize. That's teaching them what real learning feels like, which is mostly a lot of things not working until one does.

Why this matters more than the sticker

The reason I care so much about this is that the reward you choose is quietly teaching your kid what to value. Reward results and they learn to fear being wrong. Reward effort alone and they learn that looking busy is enough. Reward progress and they learn the one thing that actually carries them through school and life, which is that they can get better at hard things by working at them in a way that pays off.

That's also why I'm wary of any app or chart that dumps out prizes just for showing up and tapping around. Time spent isn't progress. A hundred coins for a hundred taps teaches the "I tryed my best" lesson all over again. The rewards worth giving, whether they're your words at dinner or points in a game, are the ones tied to a kid actually getting better at the thing.

That boy with the note, by the way. We spent the year celebrating every problem he got closer on, not every hour he sat there. By spring he was passing his quizzes, and more than that, he could tell you why his answers were right. He'd learned that trying is where you start, not where you stop.