Do Classroom Experiments Increase Student Motivation?

Abstract:     
This article studies the impact that the use of classroom experiments in an economics course may have on student motivation for this subject. In general, two expressions for motivation are effort and persistence, and choice of tasks. We take a sample of pre-university students in the Netherlands to determine if the introduction of experiments in their economics course made the students increase their effort and persistence for this subject and/or raised the likelihood that they would choose to study economic topics in the future. In total, we use five measures for these two expressions of motivation. The experiments appear to support both expressions of motivation in the sense that we find a positive and significant treatment effect for four out of these five measures.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 24

Keywords: Economic education, classroom experiments, student motivation

JEL Classification: A21, A22

working papers series