Henry Braun, Irwin Kirsch, and Kentaro Yamamoto
Teachers College Record
Forthcoming 2011
We’ve tried paying students to show up, behave, and perform but what about cash incentives to try harder on a no-stakes exam? The authors of this forthcoming article (available online, but to be published next year) put this to the test, literally, on the twelfth-grade NAEP reading assessment, a grade level whose scores are thought to be depressed by senioritis. (Seventeen-year-olds are thought to be savvy enough to know that this test doesn’t count, for them or their teachers.) Two-thousand-six-hundred seniors in fifty-nine schools from seven states were divided into three groups: The first received no money; the second was given fixed incentives of $20 before they took the test; and the third was given a conditional incentive of $5 before the test and an additional $15 for correct responses on each of two randomly selected questions for a maximum payout of $35. No group knew about the others or that it would receive incentives before test day. Researchers then administered one block of previously released twelfth-grade NAEP reading questions. (The actual NAEP tests use four blocks.) While control-group students scored an average of 289.2 points, fixed incentive students averaged 3.4 points higher, and conditional-incentive takers 5.5 points higher. This makes sense, and is no trivial amount; 5 points is about a quarter of the black-white achievement gap on twelfth-grade NAEP. This study indicates that U.S. twelfth graders know more than NAEP would have us believe. But it doesn’t account for the more troublesome fact that twelfth-grade NAEP scores have remained flat for decades. Read it for a small fee here.
