Using Goals to Motivate College Students: Theory and Evidence From Field Experiments
By Damon Clark, David Gill, Victoria Prowse, Mark Rush. Review of Economics and Statistics, 2020
111 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract Will college students who set goals work harder and perform better? We report two field experiments that involved four thousand college students. One experiment asked treated students to set goals for performance in the course; the other asked treated students to set goals for a particular task (completing online practice exams). Task-based goals had robust positive effects on the level of task completion and marginally significant positive effects on course performance. Performance-based goals had positive but small and statistically insignificant effects on course performance. A theoretical framework that builds on present bias and loss aversion helps to interpret our results.
Subfields: Education, General Decision Sciences, Safety Research
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d1d12fa2f1de50b2cf280aa82360e35247395dc9
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In Education
In General Decision Sciences
In Safety Research
Citations in the corpus
- Nudging in education (2018, background): “Clark et al. (2017) tested the effect of self-set, task and performance goals for US university students. They found that task-based goals led students to engage more with the task and, ultimately, perform better on exams. In contrast, performance goals for exams and the overall course grade had lit”