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Using Goals to Motivate College Students: Theory and Evidence from Field Experiments Damon Clark UC Irvine and IZA David Gill Purdue University and IZA Victoria Prowse Purdue University and IZA Mark Rush University of Florida Discussion Paper No. 10283 October 2016 IZA P.O. Box 7240 53072 Bonn Germany Phone: +49-228-3894-0 Fax: +49-228-3894-180 E-mail: iza@iza.org Any opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research published in this series may include views on policy, but the institute itself takes no institutional policy positions. The IZA research network is committed to the IZA Guiding Principles of Research Integrity. The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit organization supported by Deutsche Post Foundation. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its international network, workshops and conferences, data service, project support, research visits and doctoral program. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. IZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author.
IZA Discussion Paper No. 10283 October 2016 ABSTRACT Using Goals to Motivate College Students: Theory and Evidence from Field Experiments * Will college students who set goals for themselves work harder and perform better? In theory, setting goals can help time-inconsistent students to mitigate their self-control problem. In practice, there is little credible evidence on the causal effects of goal setting for college students. We report the results of two field experiments that involved almost four thousand college students in total. 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). We find that performance-based goals had no discernible impact on course performance. In contrast, task-based goals had large and robust positive effects on the level of task completion, and task-based goals also increased course performance. Further empirical analysis indicates that the increase in task completion induced by setting task-based goals caused the increase in course performance. We also find that task-based goals were more effective for male students. We develop new theory that reinforces our empirical results by suggesting two key reasons why task-based goals might be more effective than performance-based goals: overconfidence and uncertainty about performance. Since task-based goal setting is low-cost, scaleable and logistically simple, we conclude that our findings have important implications for educational practice and future research. JEL Classification: I23, C93 Keywords: goal, goal setting, higher education, field experiment, self-control, present bias, time inconsistency, commitment device, loss aversion, reference point, task-based goal, performance-based goal, self-set goal, performance uncertainty, overconfidence, student effort, student performance, educational attainment, MOOC Corresponding author: Victoria Prowse Department of Economics Purdue University Krannert Building, 403 W. State Street West Lafayette, Indiana 47907-2056 USA E-mail: vprowse@purdue.edu * Primary IRB approval was granted by Cornell University. We thank Cornell University and UC Irvine for funding this project. We thank Linda Hou, Jessica Monnet, Peter Wagner, Laurel Wheeler and Janos Zsiros for excellent research assistance. Finally, we are grateful for the many helpful and insightful comments that we have received from seminar participants and in private conversations.
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