Measuring Success in Education: The Role of Effort on the Test Itself

Abstract

US students often rank poorly on standardized tests that estimate and compare educational achievements. We investigate whether this might reflect not only differences in ability but also differences in effort on the test. We experimentally offer students incentives to put forth effort in two US high schools and four Shanghai high schools. US students improve performance substantially in response to incentives, while Shanghai students—who are top performers on assessments—do not. These results raise the possibility that ranking countries based on low-stakes assessments may not reflect only differences in ability, but also motivation to perform well on the test. (JEL C93, I21, I26, O15, P36)

Disentangling Motivation and Study Productivity as Drivers of Adolescent Human Capital Formation: Evidence from a Field Experiment and Structural Analysis

“…Carroll, 1963), grit (e.g. Duckworth et al, 2007), intrinsic motivation, self-motivation, and other executive function skills (such as in Cunha et al, 2010;Gneezy et al, 2019;Kosse et al, 2020;Cappelen et al, 2020), to describe time preference, our metric is theoretically-driven, clearly defined, and quantifiable. Likewise, while aptitude, cognitive ability, and innate ability have been used to measure academic efficiency, we develop a theoretically-consistent metric that is easily obtained and correlates with key observables.…”

Use of the Single-Item Self-Esteem Scale in a Juvenile Delinquent Population: A Convergent Validity Study

“…Concerning juvenile delinquents, there were observed problems (e.g., the SDQ), but self-esteem might not be the panacea claimed. Many programs call for extreme praise, such as at the rate of praise to reprimand as high 9:1 (Caldarella et al, 2019), yet many studies suggested praise was either not effective or might be harmful (Brummelman et al, 2017;Lepper et al, 1973;Gneezy et al, 2019;Moore et al, 2019). Other efforts included eliminating grade retention because it was harmful to students (Hughes et al, 2018;Klapproth et al, 2016) and the negative effects of school exclusionary policies in favor of letting students escape meaningful discipline (Anyon et al, 2014;Eyllon et al, 2020) Yet, mantras around grit, self-esteem, growth mindset, and other constructs did not transform students and instill academic and social skills with emotional stability.…”

Wage Policies, Incentive Schemes, and Motivation

“…The authors found no differences between no pay and very low pay, but did detect increases in submission rates and grades for the higher incentive levels. Gneezy et al (2019) vary monetary incentives on an international standardized exam from roughly $30 to $90 and report that American students improve scores from incentives, but Chinese students did not, suggesting that the effects of incentives are sensitive even to cultural differences.…”