Examining grade loss aversion – the importance of reference points

Sudipta Roy and Caleb Lewis

Education Economics, 2024, vol. 32, issue 4, 510-522

Abstract: Goal setting and grade loss aversion have individually been found to be effective motivators for student performance. We combine these two strategies to investigate, in a university setting, the effectiveness of grade endowment within a goal-setting framework. Our participants set grade goals which some must earn the traditional way, thus framed as ‘gains’, while others are awarded their target grade upfront, thus framed as ‘losses’. We find a positive impact of goal setting on student performance. We also find that the effect of grade goals framed as ‘losses’ is numerically, but not statistically, greater than those framed as ‘gains’.

Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09645292.2023.2239529 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:edecon:v:32:y:2024:i:4:p:510-522

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/CEDE20

DOI: 10.1080/09645292.2023.2239529

Access Statistics for this article

Education Economics is currently edited by Caren Wareing and Steve Bradley

More articles in Education Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().