Factors in students' decisions to attempt academic tasks

Abstract

The purpose of these experiments was to investigate the strategies used by elementary school age students in their decisions to attempt academic tasks of varying difficulty. The underlying hypothesis was that students perceive their own choices of school tasks as a series of risky decisions. Furthermore, it was hypothesized that students select among the available courses of action in such a way as to maximize long run subjective expected value. The students make use of their own subjective estimates of success and the values associated with success in determining which of the available options will give them the greatest gain over all. The students were asked to select and attempt to solve a series of sets of arithmetic problems varying in difficulty and varying in the values and costs associated with success and failure. The experimental results from the three experiments showed that SEV predictions accounts for the students' selections substantially better than did the predictions based on either of the other two alternative strategies.