Experimental Manipulations of University Student Motivation and Their Effects on Examination Performance

S ummary . Students (N = 416) viewed a videotaped lecture and then completed an objective examination based upon the lecture. The lecture was experimentally manipulated to vary in content coverage (the number of test questions covered) and the expressiveness with which it was delivered. Different groups of students received no external incentive to do well, were told before the lecture that they would receive money for each correctly answered question (incentive‐to‐learn‐and‐perform), or were told of the added incentive after the lecture but before the examination (incentive‐to‐perform). Better student performance was associated with added student incentive, better content coverage, and more lecturer expressiveness. However, the level of incentive interacted with both content coverage and expressiveness. Lecturer expressiveness had a large effect (eta 2 = 9.4 per cent) when there was no added incentive, but no significant effect when an external incentive was added. Content coverage had a small effect (eta 2 = 5.2 per cent) with no added incentive, a larger effect (eta 2 = 13.0 per cent) for the incentive‐to‐perform condition, and the largest effect (eta 2 = 26.5 per cent) for the incentive‐to‐learn‐and‐perform conditions. These findings suggest that lecturer expressiveness has a substantial impact when extrinsic motivation is low, and that added incentives have separate effects on motivation to learn and motivation to perform

Economics · Incentive · Mathematics education · Microeconomics · Communication in Education and Healthcare · Evaluation of Teaching Practices · Online and Blended Learning · Psychology · Social Psychology

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