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

By Uri Gneezy, John A. List, Jeff Livingston, S. Sadoff, Xiangdong Qin, Yang Xu. American Economic Review: Insights, 2017

122 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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)

Subfields: Demography, Education

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f65cfbfd23025234a8f83c60965a0469c0243da2

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Demography

1. K. Muralidharan
2. Mauricio Romero
3. I. Mbiti

In Education

1. I. Mbiti
2. K. Muralidharan
3. Mauricio Romero
4. A. Ganimian
5. Richard J. Murnane

Citations in the corpus

• Inputs, Incentives, and Complementarities in Education: Experimental Evidence from Tanzania* (2018, result): “15σ) is exactly in line with recent experimental estimates that quantify the role of testing-day student effort on measured test scores (Levitt, List, Neckermann, & Sadoff, 2016; Gneezy et al., 2017).”