 Do financial incentives crowd out intrinsic motivation to perform on standardized tests?John List, Jeffrey A. Livingston and Susanne Neckermann Economics of Education Review, 2018, vol. 66, issue C, 125-136 Abstract: Financial incentives linked to academic performance have been proposed as a potentially cost-effective way to support improvement. However, a large literature across disciplines finds that extrinsic incentives, once removed, may crowd out intrinsic motivation on subsequent, similar tasks. We conduct a field experiment where students, parents, and tutors are offered incentives designed to encourage student preparation for a high-stakes state standardized test. The incentives reward performance on a separate low-stakes preparatory assessment designed to measure the same skills as the high-stakes test. Performance on the high-stakes test itself, however, is not incentivized. We find substantial treatment effects on the incented tests but no effect on the non-incented test. We also find suggestive evidence that the incentives crowd out intrinsic motivation to perform well on the non- incented test, but this effect is only temporary. One year later, treated students perform better than those in control on the same non-incented test. Keywords: Educational economics; Expenditures; Field experiments; Intrinsic motivation; Extrinsic motivation (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecoedu:v:66:y:2018:i:c:p:125-136 DOI: 10.1016/j.econedurev.2018.08.002 Access Statistics for this article Economics of Education Review is currently edited by E. Cohn More articles in Economics of Education Review from Elsevier |
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