Material Incentive Motivation and Working Memory Performance of Kindergartners: A Large-Scale Randomized Controlled Trial
Abstract
This paper investigates the effect of material incentive motivation on the working memory performance of kindergartners using a large-scale randomized controlled trial covering 7,123 children from 19 provinces of Thailand. This study measures working memory of young children using the digit span task. The first gfinding is that material incentive motivation raises the working memory performance of young children (p < 0.05) but the impact is not practically significant (less than 4 percents of the mean of the control group). The second one is that young children with different background characteristics respond to material incentive motivation uniformly except with respect to child age. The third finding is that school readiness is the most predictive variable for the working memory performance of young children.
