Student Effort and Success Attribution across Countries

Abstract There exist salient differences between East Asia and North America both in student effort and in the propensity to attribute success to ability (instead of effort) with East Asian students studying more and being less likely to attribute success to ability than their North American counterparts. This paper uses a Tullock contest model with heterogenous ability levels to study the effects on both equilibrium student effort and equilibrium success attribution to ability from a few country-specific factors including the mean and dispersion of the ability distribution, as well as the size of reward for educational success. We find that equilibrium effort increases and the tendency to attribute success to ability decreases when the dispersion of the ability distribution is smaller or when the mean ability level is larger. Further, having a higher relative value for educational success, which provides a stronger motivation for academic performance, results in higher equilibrium effort, although it has no impact on success attribution.