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List, Jeffrey A. Livingston, Xiangdong Qin, Sally Sadoff, and Yang Xu*  \nUS students often rank poorly on standardized tests that estimate and compare educational achievements. We investigate whether this might reflect not only differences in ability but also differences in effort on the test. We experimentally offer students incentives to put forth effort in two US high schools and four Shanghai high schools. US students improve performance substantially in response to incentives, while Shanghai students—who are top performers on assessments—do not. These results raise the possibility that ranking countries based on low-stakes assessments may not reflect only differences in ability, but also motivation to perform well on the test.  \n(JEL C93, I21, I26, O15, P36)  \nIt is difficult to overstate the value of improving education policies for both individuals and countries. A critical input to achieving improvement is accurate measurement of student learning. To that end, policymakers are increasingly interested in using student assessment tests to evaluate the quality of teachers, schools, and entire education systems. The results of these assessment tests have often raised concerns that students in the United States are falling behind their peers in other countries. For example, on the 2015 National Assessment of Educational Progress, only 40 percent of fourth graders and one-third of eighth graders performed at or above proficient levels in mathematics (National Center for Education Statistics 2015) . Similarly, on the 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), among the 65 countries and economies that participated, US high school students  \n* Gneezy: Rady School of Management, University of California-San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093, University of Amsterdam, and CREED (email: [ugneezy@ucsd.edu](ugneezy@ucsd.edu)); List: The Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics, University of Chicago, 1126 E. 59th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, and NBER (email: [jlist@uchicago.edu](jlist@uchicago.edu)); Livingston: Bentley University, 175 Forest Street, Waltham, MA 02452 (email: [jlivingston@bentley.edu](jlivingston@bentley.edu)); Qin: Antai College of Economics and Management, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 1954 Hua Shan Road, Shanghai 200030, China (email: [xdqin@sjtu.edu.cn](xdqin@sjtu.edu.cn)); Sadoff: Rady School of Management, University of California-San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093 (email: [ssadoff@ucsd.edu](ssadoff@ucsd.edu)); Xu: The Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics, University of Chicago, 5757 S. University Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637 ([email: yangxu@uchicago.edu](email: yangxu@uchicago.edu)). Amy Finkelstein was the coeditor for this article. We thank the University of Chicago for generous financial support. Katie Auger, Richie Aversa, Debbie Blair, Jonathan Davis, Clark Halliday, Claire Mackevicius, and Daniel Mather provided excellent research assistance. This research was conducted with approval from the University of Chicago Institutional Review Board, IRB15-0448 . The study is registered in the AEA RCT Registry, AEARCTR-0003657 .  \n†Go to [https://doi.org/10.1257/aeri.20180633](https://doi.org/10.1257/aeri.20180633) to visit the article page for additional materials and author disclosure statement(s) .  \n292 AER: INSIGHTS DECEMBER 2019  \nranked thirty-sixth for mathematics performance, with scores declining since 2009 (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 2014) .  \nIn response to poor US performance on such assessments, then-US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan quipped,“We have to see this as a wake-up call. I know skeptics will want to argue with the results, but we consider them to be accurate and reliable …We can quibble, or we can face","cbCaitaTcfpJsoiN","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaitaTcfpJsoiN","pdf",1106510,18,"English","# Measuring Success in Education\n## Comparing effort across student groups\n## Experimental incentives and performance differences\n## Implications for low-stakes assessment rankings","[{\"question\":\"What question does the study investigate about education test results?\",\"answer\":\"Whether differences in standardized-test scores reflect not only ability and learning, but also differences in effort when taking the test.\"},{\"question\":\"How is test effort measured in the experiment?\",\"answer\":\"Students are offered incentives to encourage greater effort, and changes in performance are compared across schools and countries.\"},{\"question\":\"What do the results show for U.S. versus Shanghai students?\",\"answer\":\"U.S. students improve substantially in response to incentives, while Shanghai students do not show comparable gains despite already performing strongly.\"}]","Measuring Success in Education - The Role of Effort on the Test Itself | PDF",45]