Fascinating experiment showing how American students are much less intrinsically motivated than their Chinese peers when taking low-stakes exams. Giving students $1 for each correctly answered question boosted American students' performance but had no impact on Chinese students.

The effect is positive among both low- and high-performing U.S. students. Although the goal of the paper is to show how results from intl assessments such as PISA should be taken with a grain of salt, I'm also intrigued by the cross-cultural differences in intrinsic motivation!

The schools picked by the researchers:

U.S. -- 1 high-performing private boarding, 1 large public with low-performing and average students

China -- 1 below the national average, 1 average, 2 above average; all in Shanghai

The Shanghai students are given the ppp-adjusted amount (3.6 yuan for each correctly answered question).

Link to paper: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aeri.20180633

Here's the bar chart, which tells the same story as the density plot shown above.

If you are interested in this topic you should read more about the validity of PISA results here: https://twitter.com/JoshuaSGoodman/status/1199702156053368834?s=20