IntroductionChildren's motivation to excel in school begins to wane in first grade. As students become more aware of their performance relative to their peers and academic content becomes less engaging, students' intrinsic motivation suffers (Edmunds & Tancock, 2003, p. 18). Teachers are continually looking for ways to motivate their students to read more. A popular strategy is to offer students extrinsic incentives or rewards. Previous studies have proven that these incentives do not affect students' motivation to read and “undermine intrinsic motivation” (Edmunds & Tancock, 2003, p. 18). Despite evidence that these reward programs do not encourage a love of reading in students, many school districts implement these types of programs. School districts are better at providing access to a variety of books, and incentives directly tied to reading are better at keeping students motivated. Kathryn M. Edmunds and Susan M. Tancock wanted to delve deeper into this topic and try to understand the best strategies for increasing interest and motivation to read. In the article Incentives: The Effects on the Reading Motivation of Fourth-Grade Students, Edmunds and Tancock attempt to discover whether incentives unrelated to reading, incentives directly related to reading, or no incentives at all will help motivate students fourth graders to read. Study By sampling six fourth grade classes in the same school in a southern American state, Edmunds and Tancock tested their hypothesis. The couple used two classes as a control group, two classes as a treatment group that received extrinsic rewards unrelated to language arts. These three groups helped the researchers test their hypothesis... middle of article ...... the participants in this study were already using a program to help students improve their reading, the Accelerated Reading Program, and this could affect the results. The study might yield better results if the researchers repeated the same study, but no longer used the accelerated reading program. Conducting the study with the same framework to test reward-based motivation would allow researchers to see if the accelerated reading program was a motivator in itself. The conclusion of the study reminds all educators to continue to develop their strategies and techniques to motivate students. in class. Not all students learn the same way and not all strategies will motivate students. The main takeaway from this study is the reminder that educators should expand their practice and consider multiple approaches to helping students learn throughout their lives..