Using behavioural science in the classroom to unlock motivation

Everyone starts with an A

Applying behavioural insight to improve performance and narrow the socioeconomic attainment gap in education.

“Imagine a classroom where everyone started off an academic year with an “A” grade, and in order to keep the grade, a pupil had to show continuous improvement throughout the year. In this classroom, the teacher would have to dock points from a pupil’s assessment when his or her performance or achievement was inadequate, and pupils would work to maintain their high mark rather than to work up to it. How would this affect effort, expectations, performance, and assessment relative to current practice?”

This is one of the questions the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts Manufacture and Commerce) pose in their report Everyone Starts with an A, which explores the application of behavioural insight to educational policy and practice.

Using research from behavioural science and our evolving understanding of human nature, the report explores how effort, motivation, learning enjoyment, resilience, and overall performance at school can be influenced in ways not often traditionally recognised.

Download EveryoneStarts with an 'A' full report in English (PDF 393.6KB)
Download Everyone Starts with an 'A' poster in English (PDF 71.4KB)
Download Everyone Starts with an 'A' full report in German (PDF 411.4KB)
Download Everyone Starts with an 'A' poster in German (PDF 56.3KB)

Connecting theory to practice

Supported by the Vodafone Foundation Germany, this report is intended to start a conversation among educators and includes practical tips to help connect theory to real-life practice in the classroom.

Three concept areas are covered:

·         Growth mindsets: the belief that intelligence and ability are not a fixed and innate trait, but rather they can be improved and strengthened through effort and practice.

·         Cognitive biases: our thinking patterns can have systematic influence on motivation, evaluation, and teacher and pupil expectations about performance. Anchoring, the halo effect, confirmation bias, and loss aversion may all play a role. 

·         Surroundings: the physical environment of the classroom can affect various cognitive and non-cognitive skills - such as attention levels and self-control - which are important for learning.

These three points are promising areas for further research. An improved understanding of how these concepts affect pupil learning might be especially valuable to disrupt patterns of assumption about performance levels, for those who self-identify as being part of a stigmatised group, such as those from a low socioeconomic background. The RSA hopes that practitioners will continue the discussion started here by trialling the tips and techniques in their own schools and sharing their experiences with peers and colleagues.

For more information, download the paper here (or choose your preferred version above), read blogs about the launch of the report here and here, or view the press release here. 

Nathalie Spencer is a Senior Researcher in the RSA’s Social Brain Centre, and a longtime reader of the Stirling Behavioural Science blog.  

Beauty in the academic labour market

The labour market returns to "beauty" have been studied by various authors. However it is not something that you might expect to be a feature of academia. But Hot or Not: How appearance affects earnings and productivity in academia by Sen, Voia & Woolley demonstrates a surprisingly large wage premium to academics judged "hot" by students in the well known ratemyprofessors.com site. Why? Because they're worth it, I suppose. No sniggering at the back, please.

Brendan Walsh on Leaving Cert. Points and University Performance in Economics

Title: Leaving Certificate points and performance in first arts economics: a study of the 1987/88 UCD class
Authors: Walsh, Brendan M.; Garvey, Padhraic
Date: Apr-1989; UCD Centre for Economic Research Working Paper Series WP89/6

This paper shows that there is a weak association between Leaving. Cert points-scores and university performance in Economics. The authors recommend that the optimal scoring scheme for entry to university Economics would give more weight to Mathematics. It is also recommended that Irish should be given less weight, or indeed none at all. Finally, the authors recommend further research that would include socio-economic and psychological factors amongst the variables explaining academic performance at university.

Sweating your way through college...

An interesting article reported in the nytimes today shows college students who take regular and vigorous physical exercise score higher grades. A GPA difference of 0.4 (~10%) was estimated after controlling for gender, race, major, study time, and college sports in 266 surveyed college students.

What exercise variables do we have in our college data? be interesting to estimate the effect in Ireland with this larger sample.

School accountability: good or bad?

How do we get good schools? How do we get the best out of our schools? Questions like this have interested policy makers, researchers, and indeed parents for years in many countries. Accountability is one of the keywords that has emerged. We need to hold schools accountable. We hold this truth to be self evident. The idea is central in the No Child Left Behind act in the US.
But how? Well for a start one needs to measure school's peformance and compare them against benchmarks. At the very least, this means publishing measures of schools' academic outcomes, "league table" to you and me. This is done in many countries 'though not in Ireland where it is against the law.
But its not that simple. While it might be legitimate to measure the value-added by a school, simple measures of output will not measure that since the inputs (like the students) will differ. If we reward schools with high output then they have an incentive to engage in cream-skimming: exclude special-needs students, non-nationals and anyone else who might lower one's scores. Even with the information vacuum in Ireland, this occurs through various, not to say rather devious, means. The paper below addresses this important question head-on.

School accountability: (how) can we reward schools and avoid cream-skimming?

Erwin OOGHE, Erik SCHOKKAERT
Introducing school accountability may create incentives for efficiency. However, if the performance measure used does not correct for pupil characteristics, it will lead to an inequitable treatment of schools and create perverse incentives for cream-skimming. We apply the theory of fair allocation to show how to integrate empirical information about the educational production function in a coherent theoretical framework. The requirements of rewarding performance and correcting for pupil characteristics are incompatible if we want the funding scheme to be applicable for all educational production functions. However, we characterize an attractive subsidy scheme under specific restrictions on the educational production function. This subsidy scheme uses only information which can be controlled easily by the regulator. We show with Flemish data how the proposed funding scheme can be implemented.
http://www.econ.kuleuven.be/eng/ew/discussionpapers/Dps09/Dps0922.pdf

Understanding Blocks of Time Use

I discussed student time use with one of my professors several weeks ago. He mentioned the importance of considering how time is allocated across activities in sequence. For some individuals, study-time may be interrupted by other activities, whereas other individuals may avail of contiguous study sessions. This could affect how study time affects academic achievement. Another nuance of study time that was recently mentioned on the blog is the degree of attention exercised during study-time; this also has implications for academic achievement. While the scheduling of study-time could be investigated using the Day Reconstruction Method (DRM), measuring the degree of attention exercised during study is more challenging.

A recent NBER paper (Increasing Marginal Value of Time in Recreation - Raymond B. Palmquist, Daniel J. Phaneuf, V. Kerry Smith) considers the scheduling of time use in "blocks". They focus on leisure time and begin with the premise that leisure activities usually take place in discrete blocks of time that are surrounded by time devoted to other commitments (i.e. non-contiguous scheduling). An economic insight is that it can be costly to transfer time between blocks. They suggest that traditional methods for valuing time using labour markets miss important considerations (due to the costs of transferring between blocks of time).

The Palmquist, Phaneuf, and Smith paper uses non-employment time commitments to infer the shadow value of time spent in recreation. They use a survey that elicited revealed and stated preference data on household time allocation. The results from their work support the hypothesis that there is an increasing marginal value of time for recreation as the block of time increases.

The Economics of Attention

Your attention is a scarce resource. In the Information Economy, this is more critical than ever. Before I elaborate on the economics of attention, I want to motivate its importance based on previous posts about scarcity in resources that are not land, labour, capital or enterprise. We've heard about the knowledge economy, information economics and time-allocation. While knowledge, information and time are important, it may be time to turn our attention to, well... attention - the new scarce resource.

To illustrate how economists think about 'non-traditional scarce resources', I'll begin with a discussion on time use (or time-allocation). This resource is the closest in essence to attention (with knowledge and information being more similar in their nature; also, attentive use of time is needed to acquire knowledge and sift through information). Time-allocation is the first-stage decision in various production functions; on top of this comes the application of attention. As time-use has been discussed quite a bit on this blog, it's a good place to start. Here's a paper about student time use and academic performance; here's one about whether the recession is making students study harder.

More recently there was a link to the presentation at Google by Zimbardo and Boyd on time perspectives. In the MetaPsychology review of Zimbardo and Boyd's book, the point is emphasised that time cannot be replenished - in contrast to other goods, such as gold, diamonds, etc. Therefore, you have to be more careful about how to spend your time. Zimbardo and Boyd ask: "Why do we often spend our money more wisely than our time?"

I agree with Michael Daly that the ability to recognise our time perspectives and to switch between perspectives efficiently is important (see a brief summary of the perspectives here). Aaron Swartz suggests that "time perspective” is a concept which Zimbardo has essentially come up with himself, but which he feels (not without some justification) is rather important.

I'm inclined to agree - after reading about and working with the consideration of future consequences scale (CFC) a lot - "time perspective" seems to offer a more comprehensive theory of how we interact with "time". There of course may be scope to use both the CFC and the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory in a research project - a recent article by Adams and Nettle in the British Journal of Health Psychology does just that.

In addition to time-allocation and time perspectives, 'attention' plays an important role in how human behaviour produces outcomes. The most illustrative example I can think of is the recent debate on student time use and online social networking. The question that we debated was "does Facebook hurt your grades?". The conclusion offered by Aryn Karpinski (at Ohio State University) is that her research does not suggest that Facebook directly causes lower grades, merely that there's some relationship between the two factors. "Maybe [Facebook users] are just prone to distraction. Maybe they are just procrastinators".

An attempt has been made to replicate the results of Karpinski's research. Eszter Hargittai, associate professor of communication studies at Northwestern University and a fellow this year at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, says the following: "We found no evidence that Facebook use correlates with lower academic achievement". More details on this are available here.

The main point I want to make is based on the opening comment in this post: that attention is a scarce resource. While students may allocate their time across activities such as study and online social networking, how much attention are they giving to each activity? Are they so zoned into Facebook that that they can't cope with the Twitter Mania, but when it comes to study is the intensity a lot less? Is designated study time interrupted by SMS text messages, tweets and the like? Or is there just less concentration applied to the activity of study?

On his MindBlog, Derek Bownds states that concentration is the issue of our time(s) (sic). He mentions a NYT article by John Tierney on the science of concentration. A clip from this is below:

"You can lead a miserable life by obsessing on problems. You can drive yourself crazy trying to multi-task and answer every e-mail message instantly...Or you can recognize your brain’s finite capacity for processing information, accentuate the positive and achieve the satisfactions of... the focused life."

With attention and concentration such critical issues in the production functions for study, research and a whole range of activities that feed into the knowledge economy, I have taken a renewed interest in mindfulness - something which Michael has mentioned on the blog. A number of times. Liam also linked to a lecture by Kabat-Zinn on mindfulness - originally presented to staff at Google.

The framework I am most interested in, however, is what this blog post is essentially about - the economics of attention. Attention economics is an approach to the management of information that treats human attention as a scarce commodity, and applies economic theory to solve various information management problems. It's not new - Herbert Simon was perhaps the first person to articulate the concept of attention economics when he wrote:

"...in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it" (Simon 1971, p. 40-41).

Simon noted that many designers of information systems incorrectly represented their design problem as information scarcity rather than attention scarcity, and as a result they built systems that excelled at providing more and more information to people, when what was really needed were systems that excelled at filtering out unimportant or irrelevant information (Simon 1996, p. 143-144). We have such systems now - you can skip the ads on TV if you want! You can also block out email spam.

"Attention economics" today is largely concerned with the problem of getting consumers to engage with advertising (sellers compete for scarce attention). However, it would be worth developing a stream in attention economics that relates to academic production functions, the knowledge economy, health behaviour and well-being. A final thought: we should all be careful with those little drops of dopamine. And bear in mind that business is going to get your attention using style, for style is what competes for our attention amidst the din and deluge of the new media (see Richard A Lanham - The Economics of Attention).


Simon, H. A. (1971), "Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World", written at Baltimore, MD, in Martin Greenberger, Computers, Communication, and the Public Interest, The Johns Hopkins Press, ISBN 0-8018-1135-X.