Students: Underachieving Pupils and Exam Grades

students: The study headed by Professor Simon Burgess at the University of Bristol followed the performance of 10,600 students taking GCSEs at more than 60 secondary schools, and found that while the incentives had little impact on stronger students, underachieving pupils improved their exam grades and pass rates by up to 10%. Our paper is the first to test the use of behaviour incentives for high-stakes tests, and the first to compare financial and non-financial rewards over the timescale of an academic year, Burgess said, according to The Guardian. According to the research pdf published on Friday, the intervention had very substantial effects on maths and science GCSE results for about half of the pupils involved – enough to wipe out half of the attainment gap between students eligible for FSM and the rest. Researchers from three British and American universities found that offering incentives worth about £80 per half-term to pupils for improved school work, attendance and behaviour produced an outsized impact by cutting the gap in results between pupils receiving free school meals and their better-off peers. Our hope was that improved effort and engagement would raise GCSE scores, even though the scores themselves carried no rewards, said Burgess, a professor of economics. For those pupils expected to do well, and already making a huge effort at school, the incentives made little difference. Among pupils with low predicted GCSE scores, pupils in the intervention group scored substantially more than in the control group. (news.financializer.com). As reported in the news.