Damgaard and Nielsen (2018) on Nudgication

Mette Trier Damgaard and Helena Skyt Nielsen, “Nudging in Education.” IZA DP No. 11454, April 2018.

• Education decisions often involve current costs and greatly delayed benefits. Some decisions are made by “agents” – parents and teachers – on behalf of their “principals,” the students. 

• Many education decisions – such as whether to drop out of school or go to college – are not regular, everyday situations where feedback allows people to adapt to something tolerably optimal over time. 

• Can we be confident that education decisions are well-made? Evidence suggests high returns to more education. The list of potential behavioral biases influencing education decisions is long: self-control shortcomings, limited attention, loss aversion, default effects, social norms, underconfidence… Recall John Stuart Mill: "Those who most need to be made wiser and better, usually desire it least, and if they desired it, would be incapable of finding the way to it by their own lights."

• Perhaps people can be nudged in ways that will improve their choices – and improve them from their own point of view. 

• The targets of nudges can be young scholars, their parents, or their teachers. 

• The authors find 122 studies of field implementations of nudges in education. 

• Opt-in v. opt-out text messages to parents: only 7.8% opt-in, but only 3.5% opt out. Further, outcomes (grades, staying in school) improve with the opt-out default. 

• Framing financial aid as a tuition waiver versus a loan: the waivers steer a lot more law school grads to public interest work. Monetary transfers to families can be framed as being for education, and administered through schools. 

• Mixed results have been reported from framing grades as losses (as in Shrader, Wooten, White, et al., “Improving Student Performance through Loss Aversion”).

• Trying to take advantage of peer group effects is tricky, and sometimes counterproductive. Social comparison nudges can be both informational and motivational – and they can backfire.

• Intermediate assignments and deadlines seem to often raise grades. 

• Self-imposed specific task-based goals also seem helpful, along with reminders of the goal. Unrealistically high goals are demotivating. 

• Reminders to parents about their children’s education often seem helpful, too – likewise with providing informative updates to parents.

• Information provision about the returns to schooling seems to have some purchase in developing countries.

• “Boosting” skills like grit and goal-setting holds some hope for improved educational outcomes.

• Prizes: “The public can encourage the acquisition of those most essential parts of education by giving small premiums, and little badges of distinction, to the children of the common people who excel in them.” (Adam Smith) But the older the children, the less effective the prize nudge, and (like social comparisons), prizes can crowd out internal motivations. 

• Growth mindset and social belonging nudges seem to work OK…

• Nudging will only overcome a binding constraint for a (small?) subset of students. 

•  In general, the long-term effects of nudgication remain unknown.