Resumen de The effects of manipulating incentives on learning from a structured individualised psychology course

Arthur M. Sullivan, James Hartley

• This paper describes (i) the structured individualised approach to teaching introductory psychology used at Memorial University, and (ii) an experiment on the effects of manipulating incentives within this system. The experiment assessed the effectiveness of the presence or absence of “ bonus points “ given to students for reaching a certain criterion level on their weekly evaluations. The results suggested that such incentives had little effect upon student achievement as measured by a final examination, but that they did appear to increase slightly students’ final grades. These results, however, were confounded by differences due to class‐size and teacher variables.