The Effects of Student Choices on Academic Performance

This article provides an overview of the empirical effects of students' academic choices on academic performance (e.g., amount, quality, and rate of work). Twenty-nine separate experiments within 26 publications were included in the review. The choices involved performance goals and standards, the nature of assignments, instructional support within assignments, and rewards for academic performance. Experiments with students with significant cognitive or behavioral problems (approximately 17% of the experiments) yielded better performance under student choices than external choices in 80% of those experiments, whereas experiments including general education students (86% of the experiments) showed superior academic performance for students over external choices in only 12% of the experiments. Nearly 45% of the experiments included students' attitudinal perspectives of their experiences of choice. In all studies, attitudinal comparisons either favored choice, or students' judgments were similar across choice and no-choice conditions, with only one of these four studies also reporting superior performance under student choice.