first off, thank you for diving into this. As someone who studied neuroscience at college, we’re getting into some of my favourite topics :)
So, to answer your question there is actually a ton of research on the influence of gamification, reward mechanism and positive conditioning and their effects on learning outcomes. If podcasts are your thing, there is a wonderful Huberman Lab series on this too. I will link towards the end here.
Dopamine, the chemical which controls pleasure, learning and memory in the brain, can be used to hijack motivation and increase attention spans among learners – and when used correctly, it can even make your learning program/app addicting. Basically, what Litnerd does is leverage dopamine release (a big cash prize in this case creates shock and huge anticipation which acts as the initial hook/motivator) to get kids to want to signup and go through the monthly habit of our app and the reading activities.
After the first month, we do not see reading levels or activities in app go down. Even thought the cash reward incentive is gone. Students are still competing monthly and the chance to win more Litcoin (our points system in app) is what keeps them motivated afterwards. We hold competitions monthly and the reward is more Litcoin. For kids, however, an added motivator of our app is the weekly meetup. Kids want to be in the know with their peers each week at the meetup and this helps keep motivation for staying up to date with the daily reading and reading courseware.
Growing up in Karachi, my motivator to get good grades was to avoid getting beaten with a metal ruler. This was normal in my all girls school. Another motivator was that in highschool, our grades were posted in the local newspaper and it was considered dishonor to the family to not have A’s at least. This mechanism of negative reward system definitely plays into dopamine as well but research shows that positive conditioning leads to better long term learning outcomes than negative conditioning.
We have real data to show that in just 4 months, students improved comprehension scores by upwards of 70% and phonics by upwards of 40%. You can bet that i am eager to report back in a full year on how we compounded learning outcomes across Vocabulary, Phonics, Phonemic Awareness, Comprehension and Fluency.
All that to say, I feel you on tiger parenting. And that is why I am so bullish on what we are building and our positive dopamine connection by making learning fun and exciting via monthly tournaments (again, you only have a cash prize reward once. Every month thereafter, it is pure gamification without cash prizes).
Thanks again for sharing your thoughts. Would love to hear what you think?