Experimental Design Details
We plan to conduct this experiment in introductory economics and statistics courses. The introductory economics course has three sessions, and the introductory statistics course has two sessions. The experimenters are the instructors for these courses. Students in these courses are freshmen and sophomores in the Business major at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Students are randomly assigned into three treatments: ex-ante perfect memory, ex-post perfect memory, and imperfect memory. The only difference between the perfect and imperfect treatments is whether students will be reminded about their assignment completion status later in the semester. The difference between the ex-ante and ex-post perfect memory treatments is whether students know they will be reminded.
Our randomization is done at the individual level, not at the session level, and we use stratified randomization based on sessions and midterm scores.
The experiment contains two surveys and two review exercises. Completing the review exercises will help students to prepare for their final exam. We explain each item in chronological order.
Survey 1:
Students are informed about Exercise 1 and given an example of a question. They are then asked to answer:
To achieve the best learning outcome, ideally, how many questions will you complete before the first deadline and how many before the second deadline?
Predict how many questions you will complete before the first deadline and how many before the second deadline.
Other course-related questions, like how confident they are with this course, and how much time they spend on this course weekly.
If their predictions are within two questions of their actual completion, they earn 0.1 points (0.1% of course credits). Completion of this survey earns them 0.4 points (0.4% of course credits).
Students in the ex-ante perfect memory treatment are told that they will be reminded about their ideal and actual completion later this semester (before Survey 2).
Exercise 1:
Students are asked to complete 20 multiple-choice questions with two deadlines. Each question completed before the first deadline earns the students 0.05 points (0.05% of course credits), while each question completed before the second deadline earns 0.04 points. To ensure different students have a similar cost of completing this exercise, we use an interactive interface, in that we show students the correct answer along with explanations after they make an attempt. Students have to select the correct answer before they can move on to the next question.
Reminder:
Students in the ex-ante perfect memory and ex-post perfect memory treatments are reminded by email about their ideal and actual completion of Exercise 1. Students in the imperfect memory treatment are not reminded.
Survey 2:
Students are asked to recall their ideal and actual completion of Exercise 1. This serves as a manipulation check:
Please write down your ideal and actual number of questions completed before the first and second deadline of Exercise 1.
They are then asked to answer questions related to Exercise 2:
To achieve the best learning outcome, ideally, how many questions will you complete before the first deadline and how many before the second deadline?
Predict how many questions you will actually complete before the first deadline and how many before the second deadline.
If their predictions are within two questions of their actual completion, they earn 0.1 points (0.1% of course credits). Completion of this survey earns them 0.4 points (0.4% of course credits).
Exercise 2:
This exercise is similar to Exercise 1 in terms of questions and reward schemes.
Based on our theoretical predictions, we expect to observe the following treatment effects and heterogeneous effects.
Treatment effects:
Hypothesis 1:
Individuals in the ex-ante perfect memory treatment will have a smaller gap between their ideal and actual completion of Exercise 1 than those in the other two treatments.
Hypothesis 2:
Individuals in the ex-post perfect memory treatment will have a smaller gap between their ideal and predicted completion of Exercise 2 than those in the other two treatments.
Heterogeneous effects:
Observable effect 1:
More forgetful individuals, who cannot fully recall their ideal and actual completion of Exercise 1, will have a smaller gap between their ideal and predicted completion of Exercise 2.
Observable effect 2:
More perseverant individuals, who have a smaller gap between their ideal and actual completion of Exercise 1, will have a smaller gap between their ideal and predicted completion of Exercise 2.
Observable effect 3:
Individuals who have a smaller gap between their ideal and predicted completion of Exercise 2 are more likely to begin Exercise 2.