The Behavioralist Goes to School: Leveraging Behavioral Economics to Improve Educational Performance
The Behavioralist Goes to School: Leveraging Behavioral Economics to Improve Educational Performance
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行为主义者上学：利用行为经济学提高教育绩效
DOI：
10.2139/ssrn.2084718
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发表时间：
2012
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
S. Sadoff
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Steven D. Levitt;John A. List;Susanne Neckermann;S. Sadoff
几十年来，行为经济学的研究已经确立了标准经济学框架中通常不存在的因素的重要性：参考依赖偏好、双曲线偏好和非经济回报的价值。迄今为止，这些见解对教育系统的运作方式几乎没有影响。通过一系列涉及数千名中小学生的实地实验，我们证明了行为经济学对教育绩效的影响力。出现了一些见解。首先，我们发现，激励框架为损失有更强大的效果比可比的激励框架为收益。第二，我们发现，非经济激励措施比经济激励措施更符合成本效益的年轻学生，但对年龄较大的学生无效。最后，也许也是最重要的一点，与双曲线贴现一致，当奖励延迟发放时，所有激励措施的激励力量都会消失。由于教育投资的回报几乎总是伴随着延迟，我们的研究结果表明，目前的激励措施可能会导致投资不足。对于政策制定者来说，我们的研究结果意味着，在没有直接激励的情况下，许多学生在标准化考试中的努力程度很低，这可能会在学生能力，教师附加值，学校质量和成绩差距的衡量方面产生偏差。
Decades of research on behavioral economics have established the importance of factors that are typically absent from the standard economic framework: reference dependent preferences, hyperbolic preferences, and the value placed on non-financial rewards. To date, these insights have had little impact on the way the educational system operates. Through a series of field experiments involving thousands of primary and secondary school students, we demonstrate the power of behavioral economics to influence educational performance. Several insights emerge. First, we find that incentives framed as losses have more robust effects than comparable incentives framed as gains. Second, we find that non-financial incentives are considerably more cost-effective than financial incentives for younger students, but were not effective with older students. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, consistent with hyperbolic discounting, all motivating power of the incentives vanishes when rewards are handed out with a delay. Since the rewards to educational investment virtually always come with a delay, our results suggest that the current set of incentives may lead to underinvestment. For policymakers, our findings imply that in the absence of immediate incentives, many students put forth low effort on standardized tests, which may create biases in measures of student ability, teacher value added, school quality, and achievement gaps.