Motivation and Incentives in Education: Evidence from a Summer Reading Experiment

Jonathan Guryan, James S. Kim, Kyung Park

NBER Working Paper No. 20918
Issued in January 2015
NBER Program(s):Program on Children, Economics of Education Program, Labor Studies Program

For whom and under what conditions do incentives work in education? In the context of a summer reading program called Project READS, we test whether responsiveness to incentives is positively or negatively related to the student’s baseline level of motivation to read. Elementary school students were mailed books weekly during the summer, mailed books and also offered an incentive to read, or assigned to a control group. We find that students who were more motivated to read at baseline were more responsive to incentives, suggesting that incentives may not effectively target the students whose behavior they are intended to change.

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Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w20918

Published: Jonathan Guryan & James S. Kim & Kyung Park, 2016. "Motivation and Incentives in Education: Evidence from a Summer Reading Experiment," Economics of Education Review, . citation courtesy of

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