Modeling Undergraduate Student Effort: Exploring the Gap Between Effort and Grade

Abstract

While excellent reviews of student behavior relative to study time are available (e.g. Oettinger, 2002; Babcock and Marks, 2011; Allgood, Walstad, and Siefried, 2015), the contribution of the present paper is to argue that instructors may choose to adopt policies or practices that affect the gap between student effort and course grade and that such practices might usefully be characterized as impacting the average gap or the dispersion of results (the standard deviation). In addition, we include a simple model of student effort and reflections from instructors based on experiences and perceptions.