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'Making it count': incentives, student effort and performance

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posted on 2023-06-09, 05:47 authored by Arnaud Chevalier, Peter DoltonPeter Dolton, Melanie Lührmann
This paper examines how incentives to participate in online assessments (quizzes) affect students’ effort and performance. Our identification strategy exploits within-student weekly variation in incentives to attempt online quizzes. We find tournament incentives and participation incentives to be ineffective in increasing quiz participation. In contrast, making the quiz counts towards the final grade substantially increases participation. We find no evidence of displacement of effort between weeks. Using a natural experiment which provides variation in assessment weighting of the quizzes between two cohorts, we find that affected students obtain better exam grades. We estimate the return to 10% assessment weighting to be around 0.27 of a standard deviation in the in-term exam grade. We find no evidence that assessment weighting has unintended consequences, i.e., that increased quiz effort: displaces effort over the year; reduces other forms of effort; or reduces (effort and thus) performance in other courses. Finally, assessment weighting induced effort increases most for students at and below median ability, resulting in a reduction of the grade gap by 17%.

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Accepted version

Journal

Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A

ISSN

0964-1998

Publisher

Wiley

Issue

2

Volume

181

Page range

323-349

Department affiliated with

  • Economics Publications

Full text available

  • Yes

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2017-04-12

First Open Access (FOA) Date

2018-04-19

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2017-04-12

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