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Using Goals to Motivate College Students: Theory and Evidence From Field Experiments

Damon Clark1; David Gill2; Victoria L. Prowse2; Mark Rush3

1 UC Irvine and NBER · 2 Purdue University · 3 University of Florida

The Review of Economics and Statistics 2020 open access

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.

DOI
10.1162/rest_a_00864
Volume
102 (4)
Pages
648-663
Language
en
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