Making it count accepted version.pdf (987.65 kB)
'Making it count': incentives, student effort and performance
journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-09, 05:47 authored by Arnaud Chevalier, Peter DoltonPeter Dolton, Melanie LührmannThis 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 AISSN
0964-1998Publisher
WileyExternal DOI
Issue
2Volume
181Page range
323-349Department affiliated with
- Economics Publications
Full text available
- Yes
Peer reviewed?
- Yes
Legacy Posted Date
2017-04-12First Open Access (FOA) Date
2018-04-19First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date
2017-04-12Usage metrics
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