EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

All pain and no gain: When goal setting leads to more effort but no gains in test scores

Asad Islam, Sungoh Kwon, Eema Masood, Nishith Prakash, Shwetlena Sabarwal and Deepak Saraswat

Economics of Education Review, 2024, vol. 103, issue C

Abstract: We conducted an at-scale randomized control trial among 18,281 secondary students in Tanzania to examine the effects of self-set academic goals on students’ efforts and academic outcomes. We also tested the impact of combining goal setting with non-financial rewards. We found that goal-setting had a significant positive effect on self-reported student time use, study effort, and self-discipline, along with a positive but statistically insignificant impact on test performance. We also found that combining goal setting with recognition awards for achieving the goals did not demonstrate any complementary effects. Heterogeneity analysis suggested that goal-setting had a higher impact on test performance for students in the middle of the distribution of baseline learning levels. We also found that the impact of the treatment did not vary significantly across students’ gender, socioeconomic background, or type of chosen goals.

Keywords: Goal-setting; Recognition rewards; Student efforts; Zanzibar (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D9 I20 I25 O15 O55 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272775724000888
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecoedu:v:103:y:2024:i:c:s0272775724000888

DOI: 10.1016/j.econedurev.2024.102594

Access Statistics for this article

Economics of Education Review is currently edited by E. Cohn

More articles in Economics of Education Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-05-25
Handle: RePEc:eee:ecoedu:v:103:y:2024:i:c:s0272775724000888