Estimating a Coordination Game in the Classroom: Evaluating the Role of Student and Teacher Performance Incentives

评估课堂协调博弈：评估学生和教师表现激励的作用

• 批准号: 1227364
• 负责人: Petra Todd
• 金额: $ 44.83万
• 依托单位: University of Pennsylvania
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2012
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2012-09-01 至 2016-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1227364&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Estimating; Coordination; Game; Classroom; Evaluating

There is a growing interest among policy makers and education researchers in the effectiveness of incentive payments as a means for improving educational outcomes. Over the last decade, various field experiments were implemented in the U.S. and in other countries to evaluate the impact of incentives provided to students and/or to teachers based on student test score performance.The effects of incentive programs have usually been found to be modest, regardless of whether the student or teacher receives the incentive. The Behrman et. al. (2011) study is an exception. That study analyzes a three-year field experiment conducted by the Mexican Ministry of Education in 88 Federal high schools. The experiment found no statistically significant effects of offering incentive payments to the teachers alone, but large and statistically significant effects of offering incentives only to students and a still larger effect of offering the payments to both the students and teachers.A question in implementing any incentive system is how to optimally design the system, whether it is optimal to reward teachers, students or both and by how much. A limitation of field experiments is that they are only informative about the effects of incentive schemes implemented and not about alternative designs. A key question raised by the Mexican experiment, for example, is why teacher incentives were only effective in combination with student incentives, whereas student incentives were also effective on their own.This research develops and implements a framework for studying the mechanisms underlying the experimental effects and for analyzing alternative incentive designs. To this end, the project develops a model of student achievement in which students and teachers make effort decisions that affect learning outcomes. These choices, along with other teacher and student characteristics, jointly determine test score outcomes. The model can explain the pattern of incentive effects found in the Mexican program.

政策制定者和教育研究人员对激励付款的有效性，作为改善教育成果的一种手段的兴趣越来越大。在过去的十年中，在美国和其他国家实施了各种现场实验，以根据学生考试成绩的表现评估向学生和/或对教师提供的激励措施的影响。无论学生还是老师是否获得激励性，激励计划的影响通常都适中。 Behrman等。 al。 （2011）研究是一个例外。该研究分析了墨西哥教育部在88家联邦高中进行的三年实地实验。该实验发现，仅向教师提供激励付款，但仅向学生提供激励措施，以及向学生和老师提供付款的影响更大的效果。现场实验的一个局限性是，它们仅对实施的激励计划的影响而不是替代设计的影响。例如，墨西哥实验提出的一个关键问题是，为什么教师激励措施仅与学生激励措施有效，而学生的激励措施也自行有效。这项研究开发并实施了研究实验效果和分析替代激励设计的机制的框架。为此，该项目开发了一种学生成就的模型，在该模型中，学生和老师做出影响学习成果的努力决策。这些选择以及其他教师和学生特征共同确定考试成绩的结果。该模型可以解释墨西哥计划中发现的激励效应的模式。