Educating Behaviorally with Koch, et al. (2015)

Alexander Koch, Julia Nafziger, and Helena Skyt Nielsen, “Behavioral Economics of Education.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 115: 3-17, July 2015.

• Education decisions typically involve current investments of time and effort for (probabilistic) rewards that often will be realized only many years later. Education is rife with possibilities for less-than-rational decisions, including those resulting from low willpower. There is evidence that many educational decisions indeed fall prey to irrationality, such as decisions to drop out of high school. 

• Soft skills, such as personality traits and willpower, are as (or more) important as cognitive skills in educational success. 

• Family background and inputs, peer groups, school resources, and teacher skills, have large effects on scholastic success. 

• Some teachers seem to help students build cognitive skills, and some aid non-cognitive skills. Nevertheless, “it is largely unknown what constitutes a good teacher [p. 5].” 

• On average, it seems that girls get better grades and boys score higher on standardized tests. These outcomes seem to be partly explained by gender stereotypes and approaches to competition (which themselves might depend on gender stereotypes). 

• Good grades require self-control skills. People who under-study perhaps overestimate their sophistication, or lack precommitment opportunities. Dropping out and disciplinary problems might be signs of poor self-control. 

• Personal goal setting can help, by altering reference points and thereby leveraging loss aversion. Goals should not be so ambitious that they lead to despair and abandonment, however.

• Extra incentives (such as monetary bonuses) are generally good at motivating better performance with respect to attendance and enrollment. 

• Incentives are tricky, as they work differently for different populations. For instance, some students perform better with an absolute grading scale, while others thrive in relative grading systems with only a few broad ranks. 

• Effort and ability tend to be complements, so students do better if they have a positive view of their ability. A system that offers few high grades can induce students to not try, perhaps as a protective method against possibly learning negative information about their ability. A high reward offered to a child in exchange for a high grade makes it appear that the student is not expected to do well, which can lower the student’s self-assessment of her ability and subsequently undermine effort. 

• Bad schools might need to pay bonuses to attract good teachers, but good schools, which offer more intrinsic rewards to teaching, can attract good teachers without extraordinary bonuses. 

• In terms of encouraging one’s own effort and self-control, it is good to have a peer who has slightly less self-control. Then, that person’s victories can be encouraging, while that person’s failures can be distinguished from your own prospects by their relative lack of self-control.