Student Effort and Performance over the Semester

The authors extend the standard education production function and student time allocation analysis to focus on the interactions between student effort and performance over the semester. The purged instrumental variable technique is used to obtain consistent estimators of the structural parameters of the model using data from intermediate macroeconomics. The results of their study suggest that (1) students respond to higher midterm scores by reducing the number of hours they subsequently allocate to studying for the course; (2) contrary to results based on semester totals, class attendance is not related to examination scores throughout the semester; (3) study time has a small, but statistically significant, negative effect on student performance; and (4) although men outperform women on examinations, the difference may diminish over the course of the semester.