Can tangible rewards (money or trophies) improve student test scores? Yes, if the rewards are properly structured, according to a new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research. Experiments in three low-performing school districts in Chicago
Students were offered three types of rewards for better performance on low-stakes, computer-based, standardized diagnostic tests administered by school districts. The tests lasted 15 to 60 minutes and the results were available immediately after the students completed the tests. Among other things the researchers found:
- Sufficiently high financial incentives make a big difference. A $20 payment improved scores more than a $10 payment.
- Incentives are more effective when framed as losses. It was better to give the student the trophy or money and tell him or her that he or she would lose it if the score didn’t improve.
- Younger students respond better than older ones to nonfinancial incentives (trophies), boys respond to incentives better than girls, and rewards worked better for math than reading tests.
- Delayed rewards have no effect. Performance didn’t change when students were told they would get their reward a month after the test.
- Students who received incentives continued to perform better on subsequent tests than those who did not, even when the rewards were discontinued.
The authors conclude that, in the absence of immediate incentives, students do not put much effort into standardized tests. “Low baseline effort among certain groups of students can create important biases in measures of student ability, teacher value added, school quality, and achievement gaps.”
“The Behavioralist Goes to School: Leveraging Behavioral Economics to Improve Educational Performance,” Steven D. Levitt, John A. List, Susanne Neckermann, Sally Sadoff, NBER Working Paper 18165, June 2012
