Motivation and Incentives in Education: Evidence from a Summer Reading Experiment

Jonathan Guryan, James S. Kim and Kyung Park

No 20918, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: For whom and under what conditions do incentives work in education? In the context of a summer reading program called Project READS, we test whether responsiveness to incentives is positively or negatively related to the student’s baseline level of motivation to read. Elementary school students were mailed books weekly during the summer, mailed books and also offered an incentive to read, or assigned to a control group. We find that students who were more motivated to read at baseline were more responsive to incentives, suggesting that incentives may not effectively target the students whose behavior they are intended to change.

JEL-codes: I21 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-exp, nep-hrm and nep-ppm
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Published as Jonathan Guryan & James S. Kim & Kyung Park, 2016. "Motivation and Incentives in Education: Evidence from a Summer Reading Experiment," Economics of Education Review, .

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Journal Article: Motivation and incentives in education: Evidence from a summer reading experiment (2016)
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