Posted by Jonathan Willner on September 26, 1997 at 14:21:52:
In Reply to: Incentives: Money, grade points, or sheer fun? posted by Greg Delemeester on December 02, 1996 at 19:28:43:
: I would like to know what, if any, incentives instructors have used to motivate student-subjects in courses which utilize several experiments over the course of a semester. Has anybody used money on a regular basis? How about grade points? If grade points, are they part of the regular course grade calculation or merely bonus points? In addition to these incentives, I've simply relied on the sheer fun from participation (and the general competitiveness of students) to generate salient behavior. The latter, however, has not always been successful. What have others tried?
I used profits as 5% of the grade, with a numerical grade associated to the total profits, i.e. 4.0, 3.75 etc.
Difficulty was in how to set up the grading scheme. Potential rewards sizes varied across experiments so their were
students who felt and said loudly that they didn't have a chance. Also had a problem with what constitutes which grade
A choice to use mean and s.d.? Or 10%, 20%, etc. curve? Normalize to the mean? I looked at 5 or 6 methods. None one method seemed superior
or very good at providing the desired incentives.