Given a choice, students pick a harder assignment

Most students choose a more challenging assignment over an easier one if they are given a choice, according to a study, even if academics expect the opposite.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University tested the importance of autonomy in students, which is a key part of a prominent psychological model of motivation known as self-determination theory, through two studies.

The first study sought to combat the challenge of inducing students to working hard, without the use of “controlling incentives”.

In it, half the students in the study completed a difficult problem set, while the other half were also offered the option of an easier essay alternative, and the option to change their minds later.

Very few opted to switch to the less difficult essay, and the results found that students who were offered a choice spent much more time doing their assignments than the mandatory group.

“Giving students meaningful control over their own learning increased the time they spent studying and improved their performance on complex, high-level reasoning tasks,” say authors Simon Cullen, assistant teaching professor of philosophy, and Daniel Oppenheimer, a psychology professor, writing in Science Advances.

“Controlling mandates are not always needed to engage students in rigorous learning, and…increasing student autonomy can provide powerful motivational benefits.”

The second study explores mandatory attendance policies, which are thought to improve learning outcomes and boost attendance, but students do not like them.

Instead, the study put forward an “optional-mandatory” attendance policy to students, which allows them to choose at the beginning of the semester whether to make attendance a component of their grade – which about 90 per cent opted for.

Those who selected it were slightly more likely to attend weekly sessions, and had less drop-off across the term.

“Students do care about their academic success and consider their scholar-self as a core part of their identity,” the authors write.

Faced with a “dearth” of research promoting student autonomy, the authors call for more studies to be done, particularly in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) courses, where there is a drive to improve persistence rates.

The authors also suggest that one of the reasons for a lack of university policies supporting student autonomy is because academics often “doubt that students will make good decisions”.

In response to a poll, faculty members at Carnegie Mellon had incorrectly predicted that just 20 per cent of students would pick the mandatory option in the first study, and that almost no students would voluntarily complete problem sets in the second study.

In fact, the vast majority of students chose to have mandatory attendance policies and to complete the problem sets.

patrick.jack@timeshighereducation.com