Shrader, Wooten, White, et al. (2017) on Using Loss Aversion to Motivate Students

Rebekah Shrader, Jadrian James Wooten, Dustin R. White, et al., “Improving Student Performance through Loss Aversion.” December 12, 2017; updated version available here.

• Pairs of nearly identical courses are offered, where one element of each pair calculates student points as losses from a perfect base: a score of 50 means the student has lost 50 points, as opposed to the usual (control) case where points accumulate with correct assignments. 

• The idea is to see if the “loss framing” triggers greater student effort in a bid to avoid or minimize losses (as opposed to hoping to acquire gains); that is, the authors are testing to see if enlisting aversion towards losses via the grading framework leads to better student performance. 

• Students were not informed when they signed up for their classes that they were part of a field experiment. 

• The loss framing (“counting down”) was associated with higher grades – some 2.6 to 4.2 percentage points higher. 

• Did students perform better in the loss framework simply because it was unusual? 

• A couple of related papers. not (yet?) covered by Behavioral Economics Outlines, are Roland G. Fryer, Jr, Steven D. Levitt, John List, and Sally Sadoff, “Enhancing the Efficacy of Teacher Incentives Through Framing: A Field Experiment," April 2018, pdf here) and Steven D. Levitt, John A. List, Susanne Neckermann, and Sally Sadoff, “The Behavioralist Goes to School: Leveraging Behavioral Economics to Improve Educational Performance,” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 8(4): 183-219, November 2016.