The role of monetary incentives and feedback on how well students calibrate their academic performance

Gerardo Sabater-Grande (), Noemí Herranz-Zarzoso () and Aurora García-Gallego
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Gerardo Sabater-Grande: LEE and Department of Economics, Universitat Jaume I, Castellón, Spain
Noemí Herranz-Zarzoso: Department of Economic Analysis, Universitat de València, Spain

No 2024/01, Working Papers from Economics Department, Universitat Jaume I, Castellón (Spain)

Abstract: We analyze the effectiveness of monetary incentives and/or feedback in order to improve students’ calibration of academic performance. A randomized field experiment is implemented in which undergraduate students enrolled in a Microeconomics course are offered the possibility to judge their academic performance immediately before (prediction) and after (postdiction) completing each of the three exam-multiple choice tests of their continuous evaluation. Potential (actual) miscalibration in each test is calculated as the difference between the predicted (post-dicted) grade and the actual grade. The treatment variables are monetary incentives and individual feedback since they may potentially affect students’ judgment accuracy. Different treatments allow for the analysis of the effect of one of the variables alone or the joint effect of introducing the two variables. The main result is that potential and actual miscalibration are independent of the treatment variables. Our data analysis controls for confounding factors like students’ cognitive ability, academic record, risk attitudes and personality traits. Our data reflect that students’ potential miscalibration is significantly reduced in subsequent tests to the first, only in the treatment where individual feedback as well as monetary incentives are provided.

Keywords: calibration of academic performance; monetary incentives; feedback; prediction; post-diction (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 D03 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29 pages
Date: 2024
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-eur, nep-exp, nep-hrm and nep-ure
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