The punishment is the reward – why elite Chinese students take supplementary Chinese literacy tutoring despite viewing it as ineffective

Reward and punishment are basic concepts in psychology. To survive better, humans and animals often need to maximize rewards and minimize punishments and threats. The human brain makes judgments about rewards and punishments based on distinguishing among complex environmental factors and makes decisions about future actions accordingly. Chinese students have spent more than a decade of primary and secondary school education with purposeful, fine-grained time management learning with the goal of success on the college entrance exam (Gaokao). The relationship between rewards and punishments for literacy tutoring at the primary and secondary school levels and the decision-making behavior of students and parents is therefore a question worth exploring. The purpose of this paper is to explore the decision-making mechanisms of elite Chinese students’ participation in or withdrawal from literacy tutoring in Chinese and the factors behind the reward and punishment mechanisms through grounded method analysis. The results show that most elite students and their parents do not believe that language literacy tutoring will significantly improve their chances for better college entrance exam scores, but there is a complex relationship between their decision-making behavior in tutoring and the reward and punishment mechanisms. Literacy improvement, emotional values, parent-child support obligations and even face-saving culture all contribute to students’ and parents’ decision-making behaviors. Choosing tutoring that is not seen as likely to improve test scores is a common phenomenon, which suggests that the punishment itself provides the reward that drives decisions to pursue literacy tutoring.