Recognition in the Classroom

In this paper we will present an experiment that we carried out with students attending a Microeconomics course at a Dutch university in the autumn of 2012. We found that students who saw their fellow stu- dents receiving compliments given by their teacher-assistant, scored almost 0.8 grade points higher on a 1-10 scale for a midterm test when compared with students who were not exposed to compliments. Given the setting of our experiment, our results suggest that norm conformity is among the mechanisms through which recognition impacts perfor- mance. Our experiment shows that teachers can improve the study results of their students by giving compliments to good performers.