The Impact of Assignments on Academic Performance‪.‬

INTRODUCTION In this paper, we examine the impact of graded homework on the test performance of students taking economics courses. Recently, researchers have done extensive amounts of work on how to improve performance of economics students (Anderson, Benjamin & Fuss, 1994; Arias & Walker, 2004; Borg & Shapiro, 1996; Greene, 1997; Jensen & Owen, 2001). These studies focused on factors such as class size, personality type, verbal abilities, gender, and interest in economics. One of the least researched issues is the impact of graded assignments on student performance, even though assigning problem sets is now an important part of teaching strategies employed in economics courses (Geide-Stevenson, 2009). Assignments that are graded, with the score used as part of the final course grade, are expected to improve test performance. The logic is that students will be motivated to work on the graded assignment and will learn from it; consequently, test scores will improve. Graded assignments, however, do impose costs on both instructors and students. Instructors spend time grading the assignments and providing adequate feedback. As for students, they may need to forgo other, more productive learning processes and methods to make the time to work on graded assignments (Geide-Stevenson, 2009). Thus, it is necessary to examine whether and to what extent graded assignments benefit students.