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.  

Efficient Markets Classroom Experiment: Example from Yale

Toward the last fifteen minutes of this class by John Geanakoplos in Yale, he conducts a simple classroom experiment on the efficient market hypothesis basically asking students to record willingness to accept and willingness to pay for tickets he distributes and then getting them to trade. The experiment takes a while to set up and to record the results (which is always nice to see as illustrates that it does take at least some effort to get markets working!) but, in general, a really nice demonstration of how markets work. The tatonnement process worked out among the students is interesting to watch.

Behavioural Finance Class Experiment

Note: Below is intended to get some ideas going on good class-room experiments and not intended as a protocol for doing one. I will post at a later time on some existing experiments and also potential on some protocols if I can work some out. Suggestions welcome. 

Thinking of the following simple class experiment to illustrate both the efficient market hypothesis and the extent of overconfidence of being able to beat indices by lay people. Basic idea of the set up is below. Everything will be recorded anonymously though students will be able to identify themselves in the results session if they remember the stocks they picked.  Could potentially be conducted as a web survey, with the advantage that students would be able to look at the stock index in their own time and not have to remember the stocks.

1. Email the class a link to google finance and some simple instructions for how to look up prices of stocks on the NYSE.

2. Tell them that they will be asked to pick stocks on the NYSE in class as part of a classroom exercise. Tell them to write down the names of 12 stocks they would like to pick. (Hard to think of how to enforce this part without using online).

3. At start of class, hand each student a paper survey asking them to allocate a hypothetical 1000 dollars across 12 stocks in any proportion they wish. Tell them that they will hold this portfolio for one month at which stage it will be evaluated in terms of rate of return (excluding any dividends). Later these can be keyed into separate portfolios on the google finance toolbar.

4. Ask them how confident they are that they will outperform the overall market index for the NYSE

5. Ask them how confident they are that they will outperform the class average return

6. Elicit a few simple financial capability questions (and gender)

7. One month later:

- plot average rates of return across the class
- show correlation with degree of confidence of beating market; beating class average; gender and financial sophistication.

8. Basic prior is that picking 12 random stocks on the index should yield a normal distribution of average returns that are unrelated to any of the personal factors measured.

Experimental Estimates of the Effects of Online Instruction on Student Learning

4.6 million students in the United States (1 out of every 4) took a college-level online course at the start of the 2008/9 academic year. That figure rose to 5.6 million students in 2009/10, according to the eighth annual Sloan Survey of Online Learning, a report which uses data from more than 2,500 colleges and universities in the United States.

The importance of face-to-face lectures for students’ academic achievement has been demonstrated in previous economics studies such as Schmidt (1983); Romer (1993); Durden and Ellis (1995); Dolton, Marcenaro and Navarro (2003); Martins and Walker (2006) and Cohn and Johnson (2006). Therefore, it should be a priority to establish how online lectures compare; as many students are already learning online to some extent (as indicated by the Sloan Survey). A recent NBER paper by Figlio, Rush and Lin (2010) investigates the issue; details below.

Is it Live or is it Internet? Experimental Estimates of the Effects of Online Instruction on Student Learning
David Figlio (figlio@northwestern.edu), Mark Rush and Lu Yin
No 16089, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper presents the first experimental evidence on the effects of live versus internet media of instruction. Students in a large introductory microeconomics course at a major research university were randomly assigned to live lectures versus watching these same lectures in an internet setting, where all other factors (e.g., instruction, supplemental materials) were the same. Counter to the conclusions drawn by a recent U.S. Department of Education meta-analysis of non-experimental analyses of internet instruction in higher education, we find modest evidence that live-only instruction dominates internet instruction. These results are particularly strong for Hispanic students, male students, and lower-achieving students. We also provide suggestions for future experimentation in other settings.

JEL-codes: I20 I23
Date: 2010-06

Economic Games Website

Economic games can be remarkably useful for livening up classes on micro or behavioural. Greg Mankiw links to a new website detailing games that would be useful for classroom experiments (great content but a little tricky to navigate at least in Firefox). This wikiversity page on classroom economic experiments is also very useful and has links to many other sites.