Abstract
This research proposal seeks to explore how receiving information regarding relative standing within an academic environment—such as a student’s individual rank in comparison to peers—affects students’ learning experiences, engagement levels, and overall achievement. When student achievement is independent of peer achievement, economic theory predicts that information on relative achievement rank should have no impact on student effort allocation or future achievement. Extensive literature demonstrates this is simply not true [for a review, see Delaney and Devereux (2022)]. This study adds an additional dimension to this literature by introducing relative effort ranks. Rather than providing all students with information regarding their rank in some achievement distribution, we would provide a subset of students with information on their rank in an effort distribution. Our work, by considering a new type of information, is well suited to address the practical limitations of the existing literature on rank effects.