Free Ebook Motivation, Test Scores, and Economic Success
This paper is about investigate through which channels low-stakes test scores relate to economic success. The inferences in the economic literature regarding test scores and their association with economic outcomes are mostly based on tests without performance-based incentives, administered to survey participants.
The lack of performance-based incentives allows for the possibility that higher test scores are caused by non-cognitive skills associated with test-taking motivation, and not necessarily by cognitive skills alone. The coding speed test, which is a short and very simple test available for participants in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY), may serve as a proxy for test-taking motivation. To gather more definite evidence on the motivational component in the coding speed test conduct a controlled experiment, in which induce motivation via the provision of incentives.
In the experiment, the average performance improved substantially and significantly once incentives were provided. More importantly, found heterogeneous responses to incentives. Roughly a third of the participants improved their performance significantly in response to performance-based incentives, while the others did not. These two groups have the same test score distributions when incentives were provided, suggesting that some participants are less motivated and invest less effort when no performance-based incentives are provided. These participants however are not less able. And explore to what extent codingspeed test scores relate to economic success. Focusing on male NLSY participants, that the coding speed scores are highly correlated with earnings 23 years after NLSY participants took the test even after controlling for usual measures of cognitive skills like the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT) scores. Moreover, for highly educated workers the association between AFQT scores and earnings is significantly larger that the one between coding speed scores and earnings, for less educated workers these associations are of similar size.
Download Free Ebook Motivation, Test Scores, and Economic Success
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