Peers, Study Effort, and Academic Performance in College Education: Evidence from Randomly Assigned Roommates in a Flipped Classroom

Is the relation between family background and obtaining an Abitur mediated by malleable motivational variables?

“…This model was used to derive key motivational predictors of educational attainment, namely the expectation of success and the value of education, as two key elements of Wigfield and Eccles' theory. Fur-thermore, examining effort is essential to our aim of identifying protective factors for low-SES students and students from immigrant backgrounds, because students who put more effort into studying outperform their peers (Pu et al 2020). Moreover, since we aimed to identify factors predicting attainment of an Abitur (a clearly performance-related goal), we also included performance motivation.…”

“…Students who ascribed a high value to education were more engaged in school (Durik et al 2015). Consequently, students who put a great deal of effort into studying tended to outperform their peers who put less effort into studying (Arthur et al 2006;Pu et al 2020). This applied both to academic performance in general and to achievement test results in particular (Gneezy et al 2019).…”

Semester Course Load and Student Performance

“…Recent work in economics, educational psychology, and higher education have expanded and refined the list of student-based inputs affecting educational attainment and academic success to include the importance of personality characteristics (Schmitt et al 2009 ; Heckman and Kautz 2012 ; Richardson et al 2012 ; Kautz et al 2014 ; Caviglia-Harris and Maier 2020 ; Sweet et al 2019 ; and Martínez et al 2019 ), peers (Berthelon et al 2019 ; Pu et al 2020 ) and student health (Larson et al 2016 ; and Wallis et al 2019 ). Each of these categories of determinants represent a wide literature covering specific cases from practical intelligence (Schmitt et al 2009 ), grit (Fosnacht et al 2019 ), substance abuse (Wallis et al 2019 ), and stress from financial or family difficulties (Larson et al 2016 ).…”

“…The more courses students take, the less time they have to spend on each course. If performance is any increasing function of effort (Stinebrickner and Stinebrickner 2004 , 2008 ; Pu et al 2020 ), this implies a negative effect of course load on performance. One consequence of this relationship between effort and time is that other demands on students’ time such as employment and extra curricular activities could affect performance via study time.…”

“…Stinebrickner and Stinebrickner ( 2004 ) find a strong positive association between student study time and first-year grades. Stinebrickner and Stinebrickner ( 2008 ) and Pu et al ( 2020 ) use exogenous assignment of environmental factors to show that student time and effort, respectively, improve student participation and performance.…”