Posted by Ted Bergstrom on December 06, 1996 at 18:09:44:
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 have been using both money prizes and grade incentives in the following way. I make 10% of the grade depend on one's winnings in the experiments. At the beginning of the term I announce to the class that there will be a voluntary prize fund.
Anyone who chooses to participate in the prize fund must contribute $20. I offer to add $5 or $10 per participant, scrounged from university funds, so that a participant who gets the average score will make a profit of $5-10. Those who do not choose to join the fund will not have to pay, but of course they will not win any money. About 70% of the students choose to participate.
I have surveyed my students after each time that I taught the class. No student so far has found this practice objectionable. Most of the students who participated in the fund said that they thought playing for money made the experiments more interesting and made them try harder.
I think the best way to handle this would be to charge a "lab fee" to all students registering for the class and to disburse this money as prizes. When I first approached the University of Michigan administrators about this, they were very leery.
The administrator I talked to was embarrassed about being too timid to implement such a transparently good idea. So I suggested the scheme described above and he bit. I suspect that once they get used to the idea of having lab fees for this kind of course, many university administrations would allow it.