"Making It Count": Evidence from a Field Study on Assessment Rules, Study Incentives and Student Performance

Arnaud Chevalier, Peter Dolton and Melanie Lührmann

No 8582, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper examines a quasi-experiment in which we encourage student effort by setting various weekly incentives to engage in online tests. Our identification strategy exploits i) weekly variation in incentives to determine their impact on student effort, and ii) controlled cross-group variation in assessment weighting. Assessment weighting strongly encourages quiz participation, without displacing effort over the year. We estimate the return to a quiz at around 0.15 of a standard deviation in exam grade. Effort in our study increases most for students at and below median ability, resulting in a reduction of the grade gap by 8%.

Keywords: effort; feedback; incentive; higher education (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D20 I23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2014-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-exp and nep-hrm
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Forthcoming - published as ''Making it count’: incentives, student effort and performance' in: Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A, 2018, 181 (2), 323 - 349

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