Three Experiments Investigating Partial Assignment Completion and Assignment Choice

When students have the prerequisite skills, academic engagement and resulting skill development are often dependent on students’ choice behaviors. Although researchers have found that students are more likely to choose to engage in academic tasks when those tasks require less effort (e.g., Billington, Skinner, Hutchins, & Malone, 2004), learning and skill development often require high-effort engagement. Gestalt, social psychology, and behavioral researchers have posited that individuals are motivated to resume and complete tasks which they have begun, but not finished (Rickers-Ovsiankina, 1928; Skinner, 2002). However, no researchers have investigated partial academic assignment completion on students’ choice behavior, while controlling for other variables that influence student choice. The current dissertation included three experiments designed to evaluate the effects of partial assignment completion (PAC), relative effort, and invested effort on students’ assignment choice behavior. In Experiment I, mathematics tasks were used to establish existence of a PAC effect on assignment choice. Significantly more seventh-grade students chose to finish their partially completed assignment (n = 52) than chose to complete a new, equivalent assignment (n = 33). In Experiment II, the strength of the PAC effect was investigated. Significantly more seventh-grade students chose to complete a lower-effort mathematics assignment (n = 55) than chose to finish their partially completed mathematics assignment (n = 33). Experiment III provided some evidence that the amount of effort initially invested in the partially completed assignment may influence motivation to complete that assignment. Nevertheless, even when students completed half of an assignment (10 long math computation problems), they were still more likely to choose to complete a new assignment that required less effort. v Together, these experiments suggested that a PAC effect exists, but may not be strong enough to overcome the variable of effort, even when students have invested a meaningful amount of time and effort in the partially completed assignment. As these experiments were the first to study PAC in an applied setting while controlling for assignment effort, difficulty, and interest, they may have heuristic value. Discussion focuses on limitations and directions for future researchers.