Below you’ll find one of two abstracts submitted to the Jubilee Centre’s 2026 annual conference. You can find the other abstract here. Neither were accepted.
The abstract reports on my MA dissertation study, which attempted to test the lure hypothesis in a school setting. The lure hypothesis, recall, suggests that rewards can be used to lure children into developing more autonomous forms of motivation. In this case, the results were inconclusive.
However, while the lure hypothesis remains elusive, the study’s real contribution of the study lies in its evaluation method – a simple, adaptable design that could be used to evaluate virtually any character education intervention.
Here’s the basic structure:
- Recruit students who are extrinsically motivated to engage in an activity that manifest the target virtue, filtering out autonomous students using the pre-intervention script. For example, if the target virtue was gratitude, you could recruit students who were extrinsically motivated to engage in gratitude journaling – an activity that manifests gratitude.
- Randomly assign students to two groups: one receiving the intervention, the other acting as a control.
- Measure motivation across timepoints using a child-friendly version of the Intrinsic Motvation Inventory [coming soon].
- Analyse data using a repeated measures ANOVA.
- Evaluate the intervention: a significant Group × Time interaction would indicate the intervention increased autonomous motivation.
As mentioned in the abstract, the main challenge is designing school-based activities that manifest the target virtues. This is fairly straightforward for gratitude. But what about justice or bravery? Not so easy.