Improving Student Performance through Loss Aversion

Journal article

Ben Smith, Rebekah Shrader, Dustin White, Jadrian Wooten, John Dogbey, Steve Nath, Michael O'Hara, Nan Xu, Robert Rosenman
Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology, vol. 5(4), 2019, pp. 278–288

DOI: https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/stl0000149

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APA Click to copy
Smith, B., Shrader, R., White, D., Wooten, J., Dogbey, J., Nath, S., … Rosenman, R. (2019). Improving Student Performance through Loss Aversion. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology, 5(4), 278–288. https://doi.org/https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/stl0000149

Chicago/Turabian Click to copy
Smith, Ben, Rebekah Shrader, Dustin White, Jadrian Wooten, John Dogbey, Steve Nath, Michael O'Hara, Nan Xu, and Robert Rosenman. “Improving Student Performance through Loss Aversion.” Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology 5, no. 4 (2019): 278–288.

MLA Click to copy
Smith, Ben, et al. “Improving Student Performance through Loss Aversion.” Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology, vol. 5, no. 4, 2019, pp. 278–88, doi:https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/stl0000149.

BibTeX Click to copy

@article{ben2019a,
  title = {Improving Student Performance through Loss Aversion},
  year = {2019},
  issue = {4},
  journal = {Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology},
  pages = {278–288},
  volume = {5},
  doi = {https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/stl0000149},
  author = {Smith, Ben and Shrader, Rebekah and White, Dustin and Wooten, Jadrian and Dogbey, John and Nath, Steve and O'Hara, Michael and Xu, Nan and Rosenman, Robert}
}

Framing an outcome as a loss causes individuals to expend extra effort to avoid that outcome (Tversky & Kahneman, 1991). Because classroom performance is a function of student effort in search of a higher grade, we seek to use loss aversion to encourage student effort. This field quasi-experiment endows students with all of the points in the course up front, then deducts points for each error throughout the semester. Exploiting 2-course sequences in the business school of a midwestern university, a control for domain-specific knowledge, this study examines the impact of loss aversion when controlling for the student’s knowledge in a specific subject. This quasi-experiment indicates that students perform 3−4 percentage points better when controlling for student ability and domain knowledge (148 subjects). This result is significant at the 1% level in our most robust specification (p = .0020). This result is confirmed by a specification including 4 courses and controlling for student characteristics (217 subjects, p = .0190).

Improving Student Performance through Loss Aversion

Journal article

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