The goal of the present paper is to survey selected models of teaching and learning with two primary goals in mind. The first is to simply assess the state of the literature, with particular regard to the extent to which this literature has drawn on the insights of behavioral economics. The second goal concerns the pragmatic on the ground design of our own syllabuses.
Perhaps the place to begin such a survey is with Allgood, Walstad, and Siefried (2015) “Research on Teaching Economic to Undergraduates,” Journal of Economic Literature. They model both the decision making of teachers in a “professorial choice” model and the decision making of students in a “student choice” model. For the former it is assumed that utility is a function of student learning (itself a function of student grades), research output, and an outside good called consumption. The student choice model assumes utility is a function of grades, knowledge, study time, and leisure. The analysis proceeds by comparative statics, considering for example, the introduction of pedagogical innovations or the effects of attendance policies on out-of-class study time.
Oettinger (2002) “The Effect of Nonlinear Incentives on Performance: Evidence from ‘ECON 101’,” The Review of Economics and Statistics and Grant and Green (2013) “Grades as Incentives,” Empirical Economics both have models of student choice which set student effort as the choice variable with the goal of maximizing only utility of discrete (letter) grades net of a cost of effort function. The particular research question of these papers concerns the effect of grade thresholds but the treatment of uncertainty raises issues of behavioral economics as well. The primary work of this paper will be to reconstruct the numerical analysis of these models as well as any further models suggested by them. The paper will conclude with some reflections on the implications for our own grading practices.