Teachers’ Metamotivational Beliefs About Extrinsic Incentives: An Interpretive Inquiry

Teachers play a central role in shaping the motivational climate of the classroom, yet the strategies they use are not always grounded in research evidence. Teachers’ beliefs about what motivates students sometimes conflict with established findings, such as the potential for certain rewards to undermine intrinsic motivation. Understanding these beliefs and the reasoning behind them is therefore essential for aligning classroom practices with approaches that support long‐term engagement. Drawing on the metamotivation framework, which examines how individuals regulate their motivational strategies based on personal theories of motivation, this study investigated teachers’ beliefs about the use of extrinsic incentives, with a focus on how they explain and justify these beliefs and the contextual experiences that shape them. Twenty intermediate schoolteachers participated in semi‐structured interviews. Findings revealed a striking pattern of metamotivational misalignment: Most teachers confidently predicted that extrinsic incentives would enhance motivation, despite empirical evidence to the contrary, and many maintained this expectation even after acknowledging that effort often declines once incentives are withdrawn. Although intrinsic motivation was widely recognized as important in principle, rewards remained teachers’ default strategy for regulating engagement in practice. Teachers’ metamotivational reasoning was shaped by personal classroom experiences, assessment and grading practices, and cultural norms, producing internally inconsistent but highly resilient motivational beliefs. The results underscore the need for professional development that bridges research evidence with classroom realities.