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.  

Innovation in Education: some Irish success

Amongst the buzz-words one hears a lot about in education these days are innovation and globalization. As this article shows one Irish organization in this field (Hibernia College) is doing well (and doing good too). Curiously enough, it is a for-profit company.

Graph of the year? Mother's education and breastfeeding

Its that time when people reflect on the year gone by, lists of pivotal events, dead celebs etc. There are also lots of suggestions for "graph of the year" going round. It's pretty arbitrary of course since it depends on what people find interesting. Graphs are great but they have the potential to mislead since, by their nature, they are simple but evocative.
Anyway, here is one I find very striking. It graphs the rate of breastfeeding initiation (i.e. whether the child is breastfed at all) by their mother's education level using the Growing Up in Ireland data. It is one of the most pronounced socio-economic gradients I have come across. A child whose mother is a graduate has about a 77% chance of being breastfed. At the other end of the scale it is a staggering 17%. If, instead of looking at "ever" you look at a duration of "6 weeks+" the story is much the same.
Note that the average (i.e. the % ever breastfed, using sampling weights) is about 45% which is way lower than pretty much anywhere else I have looked at. The US and UK data are in the low 70's. Many countries are higher. Why there is such a low average and such a steep socio-economic gradient in Ireland I don't know. But given the benefits to mother and child it should be a matter for concern - and action.

Education and the budget

Lots could be, and doubtless will be, said about the budget. But it is worth looking at some of the changes regarding education. The increase in higher level fees is 500Euro and only for the first child in the family (no increase for the second kid). So the government has gone out of its way to protect the relatively well off who dominate university. Meanwhile the Educational Disadvantage Budget has been slashed by 60% and student grants are to be cut by 4%.
Well at least you know what the government's priority is: protect the middle class.

Is the Irish Education System Failing?

I have been asked to talk to the Galway student debating society on the issue of whether the Irish education system is failing. I am interpreting this as the whole system rather than just third level. I am coming down on the side that it is far below its potential. I don't really believe the whole system has failed or that it is structurally unsound. By and large, we have a modern system of education comparable to other modern developed countries, with a rigorous and standardised second-level system that is externally recognised and several higher level institutions that are well-ranked internationally. So when we assess failure, we must put it in the perspective of starting with the type of expectations a modern developed country like Ireland should have. This means being grateful for what we have and the opportunity we have relative to most of the world and most of history, while not being afraid to point out where things are clearly performing below-par.

In terms of evidence of failure, below are some broad-brushes that I am happy to argue with people during the week.

- The crazy, unethical and badly judged banking policies we adopted throughout the last ten years are evidence of system weaknesses throughout finance and government that at least partly have their roots in poor capacity within these systems.

- Our education system often reinforces rather than challenges other economic structural weaknesses in the system (something pointed out by Charles Larkin and others on their website).  For example, restrictive practices in professions are reflected in rationing of university places. Overheating of the property market was reinforced by massive state subsidisation of training for construction workers.

- As discussed by Kevin, there is widespread evidence that SES gradients in attendance of university have persisted, showing that second-level education is unable to equalise access to these institutions.

- Another one that Kevin deals with a lot, there is a basic failure to provide reasonable information that could be used both for researchers to analyse the effect of spending and parents to make informed choices.  

- The level of graduate unemployment is making a mockery of the positioning of universities as a major source of economic performance.

- The fact that the response of individuals to unemployment is much the same as it always was must really make us question how we have been educating people consciously or subsconsciously to think of employment as the main source of positive worth. An education system fit for the 21st century will need to educate people in how to look after themselves financially and emotionally in what will continue to be a volatile world. We are definitely failing to do that at present.

- Related to this is the Heckman argument. Despite the enormous evidence on the importance of building a wide range of capabilities among young people, this has not filtered into the making of modern education policy in a meaningful sense. Pre-primary and primary education in Ireland are still arguably viewed as far lower priorities than the glossier third level and university issues. When did we last have a real debate about primary education in Ireland? Yet, one cannot open a newspaper without a debate about whether people should get extra points for honours maths.

- The continued socioeconomic disparity in the prison population continues to demonstrate the inability of the Irish education system to lift the most vulnerable children out of persistent disadvantage.

- While the government has doubled the number of PhD's with a view to them being the human engine room of high tech innovation, there is not evidence yet that this has started to work. PhD matching may become an increasing issue when science funding in the university sector begins to contract.

Some Online Irish Education Data That You May Not Have Seen

1. Primary-school class sizes for the last four years: data available by primary-school and class-room. The source for this data is the Annual Census of Primary Schools.

2. Retention Rates of Pupils in Second-Level Schools: 1991 to 2001 Entry Cohorts. These data are aggregated but provided on a county by county basis. The overall Leaving Certificate retention rate has increased in the five years between the 1996 cohort and the 2001 cohort: from 81.3% to 84.7%.

3. The State Examinations Commission website has a statistics page providing Leaving Certificate and Junior Certificate grade information for every subject, and by gender, for the years 2000-2010.

Assorted Links: 7th September 2010

1. The Hewlett Packard Social Computing Lab focuses on 'methods for harvesting the collective intelligence of groups of people in order to realise greater value from the interaction between users and information'.

2. "The agony and the ecstasy: the history and meaning of the Journal Impact Factor" (Garfield and Sher, 2005).

3. Measurement of administrative burden imposed on Irish business by Central Statistics Office inquiries

4. http://www.bundle.com: Track your spending

5. DIT School of Computing launches a new master's programme in data analytics

6. A story on the OECD's Education at a Glance 2010, in today's Irish Independent: "For every €7 spent on a primary pupil, nine is spent on second level and 12 is spent on third level".

7. Another Irish Independent story: the mechanics of random selection in the CAO application process

8. Bloomberg Businessweek: The World's 50 Most Innovative Companies

9. Below is a video from the OECD showing the importance of tax credits for understanding government funding of research and development (R&D). When tax credits are taken into account, Korea spends the most (as a percentage of GDP) on R&D. Canada spends ten times more on R&D tax credits than it does on direct funding for R&D.

Meghir and Rivkin NBER - Econometric Methods for Research in Education

Econometric Methods for Research in Education 

Author info | Abstract | Publisher info | Download info | Related research | Statistics

Author Info

Costas Meghir
Steven G. Rivkin
Additional information is available for the following registered author(s):

• Costas Meghir

Abstract

This paper reviews some of the econometric methods that have been used in the economics of education. The focus is on understanding how the assumptions made to justify and implement such methods relate to the underlying economic model and the interpretation of the results. We start by considering the estimation of the returns to education both within the context of a dynamic discrete choice model inspired by Willis and Rosen (1979) and in the context of the Mincer model. We discuss the relationship between the econometric assumptions and economic behaviour. We then discuss methods that have been used in the context of assessing the impact of education quality, the teacher contribution to pupils' achievement and the effect of school quality on housing prices. In the process we also provide a summary of some of the main results in this literature.

Social Segregation in Irish Schools

Social segregation in schools refers to the uneven distribution across schools of children from different socio-economic backgrounds. Why should we care? One simple reason is that not all schools are as good as others so if particular groups are concentrated in "good schools" (however that is measured) that has implications for inequality. Of course if low socio-economic status (SES) children were concentrated in the best schools then this would tend to mitigate inequality but in reality the opposite is likely to be the case and hence education could act to exacerbate inequalities with well-off children's advantage increasing, or at least being maintained, as a result of their schooling. It has also been argued that high levels of social segregation are bad for social cohesion.
A recent paper provides valuable evidence on this for a wide range of countries including Ireland. They calculate two measures of social segregation, a dissimiliarity index D and Hutchens H index. Each ranges between 0 (no social segregation with each school's distribution of SES the same as that of the country) and 1 (where each school consists of children with the same SES). The H index has the advantage that it is additively decomposable: the index can be written as a weighted average of the score for sub-groups (e.g. private vs. public schools).
Of the 27 countries (using PISA 2000,2003), by far the highest level of segregation is in Hungary. Japan and Sweden have the lowest levels of segregation. In general countries with "tracking", separate academic and vocational school systems, have high levels of segregation. Ireland actually does pretty well, having the 7th lowest level of social segregation. Northern Ireland, by contrast, has the 11th highest level of segregation.

Social segregation in secondary schools:how does England compare with other countries?
Stephen P. Jenkins, John Micklewright and Sylke V. Schnepf
Oxford Review of Education , 34(1) February 2008, 21–37

Inside the brain of a 5 year old: educational neuroscience

BBC Radio 4 recently broadcast an excellent documentary by Claudia Hammond on the emerging field of educational neuroscience: how insights from brain research can inform teaching practice. It also discusses various "neuro-myths" that teachers, like most people, may be susceptable to. The program can still be heard at the link below (but not for long, alas). However the web-links there provide useful introductions to this fascinating field.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00rm072

The British Pre-Budget Report: What Does It Mean for Education and Youth Unemployment?

The BBC provide a synopsis of how the British Budget will affect youth unemployment and the education sector across the pond. Here.

* Another half a million primary school children in England will get free school lunches. This will affect families with a household income below £16,190 and will be staged, half in September next year and the rest a year later - ultimately benefiting about 500,000 children at a cost of £140m a year. (More on the meals initiatives in the comments section).

* The government will offer £8m of financial support for up to 10,000 undergraduates from low-income backgrounds to take up short-term internships. The existing guarantee of a place in education or training for every 16 and 17-year-old would be available again in September 2010. From next month no-one under the age of 24 need be out of work for more than six months before being guaranteed work or training - rather than the current 12 months.

Education @ Geary November 9th Monday

A reminder that there will be a one day symposium of research on education at the Geary Institute on Monday November 9th, starting at 9.30am. Full schedule below

Session 1 Early Childhood
9.30-10.00 Kelly McNamara “Evaluation of the Preparing for Life Programme: Two years on”
10.00-10.20 Sarah Finnegan “Differential teacher and parent ratings of school readiness in a disadvantaged community”
10.20-10.40 Carly Cheevers “Maternal parenting behaviours and child internalising and externalising behaviours: Evidence from a school readiness survey”

Coffee (20 minutes)

Session 2: Youth Inequalities
11.00-11.20 Veruska Oppedisano “Endogeneity in educational production functions: Evidence from PISA”
11.20-11.40 Peter Robert “Educational market, school choice, student performance”
11.40-12.00 Mary Doyle “The Marginalised on the Margins”
12.0.12.20 Dorren McMahon “The Impact of Social Origins and School Systems on Educational Transitions in Europe and the USA”

Lunch (40 minutes)

Session 3: Open session
1.00-1.20 Amélie Petitclerc “Social selection factors for participation in child care”
1.20-1.40 Sylvana Côté “Participation in child care and risk for infections”
1.40-2.00 Kevin Denny “The effect on education on pro-social behaviour: evidence from a quasi-experiment”

Coffee (20 minutes)

Session 4: Higher Education
2.20-2.40 Orla Doyle “The impact of a university access programme on student performance”
2.40-3.00 Cathy Redmond “Predictors of third level student grades: Evidence from Irish universities”
3.00-3.20 Martin Ryan “Job satisfaction & matching amongst post PhD researchers”


http://geary.ucd.ie/images/stories/news_items/Geary_Educational_research.pdf

Like Father, Like Son? A Note on the Intergenerational Transmission of IQ Scores

Like Father, Like Son? A Note on the Intergenerational Transmission of IQ Scores
by Sandra E. Black, Paul Devereux, Kjell G. Salvanes
published in: Economics Letters, 2009, 105 (1), 138-140

Abstract:
More able parents tend to have more able children. While few would question the validity of this statement, there is little large-scale evidence on the intergenerational transmission of IQ scores. Using a larger and more comprehensive dataset than previous work, we are able to estimate the intergenerational correlation in IQ scores, examining not just average correlations but also how this relationship varies for different subpopulations. We find that there is substantial intergenerational transmission of IQ scores; an increase in father’s IQ at age 18 of 10% is associated with a 3.2% increase in son’s IQ at the same age. This relationship holds true no matter how we break the data. This effect is much larger than our estimated elasticity of intergenerational transmission of income of approximately .2.

Literacy, Handwriting Problems and Legibility

Those interested in research on literacy may find this interesting. It seems entirely possible that the American education system may abandon the Palmer handwriting method for other typographical design rules.

Learning from Outsiders

James Markusen and Natalia Trofimenko have a recent paper on how local workers learn from foreign firms (NBER Version below)

Teaching locals new tricks: Foreign experts as a channel of knowledge transmission

Markusen, James R.
Trofimenko, Natalia

Gains from productivity and knowledge transmission arising from the presence of foreign firms have received a good deal of empirical attention, but theoretical micro-foundations for this mechanism are limited. Here we develop a model in which foreign experts may train domestic workers who work with them. Hypotheses are generated under the assumptions that workers learn from experts (the effect of using an expert is not strictly temporary) and that this learning is embodied in the workers rather than in the firm. We use fixed effects and nearest neighbor matching estimators on a panel of plant-level data for Colombia that identifies the use of foreign experts, to show that these experts have substantial and persistent positive effects (though not always immediate) on the wages of domestic workers and on the value added per worker.

New JPE Paper on School Autonomy

Link here but access may be restricted

Clark (2009): Performance and Competitive Effects of School Autonomy
This paper studies a recent British reform that allowed public high schools to opt out of local authority control and become autonomous schools funded directly by the central government. Schools seeking autonomy had only to propose and win a majority vote among current parents. Almost one in three high schools voted on autonomy between 1988 and 1997, and using a version of the regression discontinuity design, I find large achievement gains at schools in which the vote barely won compared to schools in which it barely lost. Despite other reforms that ensured that the British education system was, by inter- national standards, highly competitive, a comparison of schools in the geographic neighborhoods of narrow vote winners and narrow vote losers suggests that these gains did not spill over.

Interesting paper on education choice in Ireland

Looks interesting:
Participation in Higher Education: A Random Parameter Logit Approach with Policy Simulations Flannery, Darragh (National University of Ireland, Galway)
O'Donoghue, Cathal (Teagasc Rural Economy Research Centre)
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp4163&r=edu
In this paper we present a theoretical model of higher education participation. We assume that young people that complete upper secondary education are faced with three choices, go to higher education, not go to higher education or go to higher education and work part time. Utilizing the Living in Ireland survey data 1994-2001 we model this choice in an Irish context by variation in costs (direct and indirect), the estimated lifecycle returns and household credit constraints. Using a random parameters logit choice model we find that simulated lifecycle earnings positively impact the educational/labour choices of young individuals in Ireland. This positive relationship is also found to be true for a choice-specific household income variable constructed in the paper. From the random parameters logit estimations we also find that preferences for choices with higher simulated lifecycle earnings and household income vary across individuals

Pay Peanuts Get Monkeys

A paper below by NZ Economist Glenn Boyle argues that disparities relative to outside options matter.

Link Here

Abstract
In most countries, academic pay is independent of discipline, thus ignoring differences in labor market opportunities. Using some unique data from a comprehensive research assessment exercise undertaken in one such country -- New Zealand -- this paper examines the impact of discipline-independent pay on research quality. I find that the greater the difference between the value of a discipline's outside opportunities and its New Zealand academic salary, the weaker its research performance in New Zealand universities. The latter apparently get what they pay for: disciplines in which opportunity cost is highest relative to the fixed compensation are least able to recruit high-quality researchers. Paying peanuts attracts mainly monkeys.

Reevaluating Learning - NBER Summary Duflo

From the NBER site, an examination of factors that improve student outcomes from Esther Duflo. The review is based on experimental evaluations of changes in remedial education, classroom organisation and teacher incentives, among others

http://www.nber.org/reporter/2009number1/duflo.html

Leaving Certificate

I attended a talk recently by David Lubinksi who has been working on major studies of gifted individuals. One point that is made in his work is that people who are gifted in spatial intuition and likely to be the inventors and designers of the future are missed in standard aptitude tests. His website is below so that you can read his papers first hand. It got me thinking very clearly again about the use of the Leaving Certificate as a screening mechanism for college. I have generally been in favour of not tinkering with this too much. I admit that part of this comes from my own experience of coming from a working class neighborhood and being (by cohort standards) academically bright. Well meaning interview boards would likely have rejected me faster than a straight academic dogfight such as the Leaving Certificate represents and, in general, Ireland seems to me too small a country to have a system where committees would have a bearing on who gets into publicly funded universities.


Website


However, over time I have become increasingly frustrated to think that some of the potentially most productive people in society are being held back because they cant summon up the motivation to conjugate Gaelic verbs or are puzzled as to why anyone should care about the rantings of old Irish poets or why Cathy is in love with Heathcliff. To follow Lubinski and people with this mindset, how many people with gifted spatial intuition and related abilities are we missing out each year due to this process? If the Government is serious about promoting STEM achievement, should we consider an alternative track for gifted students to signal their abilities other than a general exam process. For example, should Engineering, Mathematics and Science subjects also be allowed to allocate places based on something similar to scores on domain relevant aptitude tests? The precise nature of the tests needed is outside my expertise but assuming for a moment that one can measure these traits, would it then also be mad to suggest that the ones who are really in the top of the distribution would be identified earlier and given more support?

Related to this, I am working at present on a detailed memo to follow on the research internships memo that I posted last year. This memo examines the literature on support systems for very high ability undergraduate college students, including things like offering them mentorship, extra courses, scholarships abroad and so on. I will be posting on this over the next few months. We have had a lengthy and productive access debate in Ireland but far less debate on how to deal with exceptionally talented individuals. While some of the latter issue is also an access issue, there is a lot more to it and we should try to use this blog to tease out some of the issues. Comments welcome.