Is The End in Sight? Student Regulation of In-Class and Extra-Credit Effort in Response to Performance Feedback

Students enter courses with aspirations, but often their behaviors and performance don't put them on track to achieve those aspirations. We explore how students regulate their in-class attendance and extra-credit participation in response to performance feedback. We propose and find support for a punctuated-equilibrium model (Gersick, 1988) in which students' responses to goal-discrepant feedback vary over time, such that early feedback generates little behavioral response, but late feedback incites larger changes. We also find evidence that student reactions to positive goal-discrepant feedback can be stronger than their reactions to negative goal-discrepant feedback, and that student reactions to in-major feedback are qualitatively different than reactions to non-major feedback. We discuss implications for theory and for educators.