The Centre for Experimental Social Sciences (CESS) Nuffield - FLAME University is pleased to invite you to a live webinar from Nuffield College, University of Oxford. David Gill, Associate Professor of Economics at Purdue University will be presenting his work titled "Using Goals to Motivate College Students: Theory and Evidence from Field Experiments." The abstract of his talk is as follows: "Will college students who set goals for themselves work harder and perform better? In theory, setting goals can help time-inconsistent students mitigate their self-control problem. In practice, there is little credible evidence on the causal effects of goal setting for college students. We report the results of two field experiments that involved almost four thousand college students in total. One experiment asked treated students to set goals for performance in the course; the other asked treated students to set goals for a particular task (completing online practice exams). We find that performance-based goals had no discernible impact on course performance. In contrast, task-based goals had large and robust positive effects on the level of task completion, and task-based goals also increased course performance. Further empirical analysis indicates that the increase in task completion induced by setting task-based goals caused the increase in course performance."


You can learn more about Prof. Gill's work here.