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.  

What Do Students Learn in College?

They might attend their lectures, do additional hours of study and get good grades; but... what are students learning in college? A recent article in the New York Times asks just this question: "what are America's kids actually learning in college?". Thanks to Peter C for sending on the link. According to the NYT article, "a provocative new book, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, makes a strong case that for a large portion of the nation’s seemingly successful undergraduates, the years in college barely improve their skills in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing." The authors are Professors Richard Arum of New York University and Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia. A Google-Books preview is available here.

Arum and Roska's research draws on survey responses, transcript data, and the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardised test administered to students in their first semester and then again at the end of their second year. More details on the authors' research project are available here. According to the authors' analysis (of more than 2,300 undergraduates at twenty-four institutions), 45 percent of these students demonstrate no significant improvement in a range of skills, including: critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing (during their first two years of college). According to the authors, "many students come to college not only poorly prepared by prior schooling for highly demanding academic tasks that ideally lie in front of them, but — more troubling still — they enter college with attitudes, norms, values, and behaviors that are often at odds with academic commitment."

In relation to academic commitment, education economists would draw attention to the idea of non-cognitive skills. Pedro Martins has shown that a targeted program related to non-cognitive ability – study skills, motivation, and self-esteem – can improve student achievement at state schools in Portugal. In work that I have done with Liam and Colm, there is a clear demonstration of academic advantage for Irish university students who are more future-orientated and more conscientious. A targeted program (providing academic and social supports) was evaluated in the setting of an Irish university by Denny, Doyle, O’Reilly and O’Sullivan (2010); the results suggesting it was an effective means of improving academic outcomes for socio-economically disadvantaged students attending Irish universities.

Returning to the NYT article, it interprets Arum and Roksa's research to indicate that "students are hitting the books less and partying more. Easier courses and easier majors have become more and more popular. Perhaps more now than ever, the point of the college experience is to have a good time and walk away with a valuable credential after putting in the least effort possible." A study by three Cornell economists found a large increase in enrollment in courses with a median grade of A; after a new policy which introduced the publication of course median grades on the Internet. This is suggestive of students enrolling in classes where it easier to obtain higher grade-scores; an issue which I raised before in relation to the Irish Leaving Certificate: the final examination at the end of second-level education Ireland.

Recent research by Brian Jacob, Brian McCall and Kevin Stange (all from the University of Michigan) specifically addresses the issue of the consumption-value of college education. Jacob, McCall and Stange report that students "appear to value several college attributes which we categorize as consumption because their benefits arguably accrue only while actually enrolled, including college spending on student activities, sports, and dormitories." In addition, research by Babcock and Marks (discussed on this blog before) documents that academic time investment among full-time college students fell from 40 hours per in 1961 to 27 hours per week in 2003. Another article from the NYT tells us that Arum and Roksa's research is "consistent with the findings of the National Survey of Student Engagement, which has polled more than 2 million students at more than 1,000 colleges and universities over more than a decade — and reported that many spend little time studying or writing."

According to this article in the Huffington Post, the Collegiate Learning Assessment "has its share of critics who say it doesn't capture learning in specialized majors or isn't a reliable measure of college performance because so many factors are beyond their control." Nonetheless, it looks like this debate is set to grow more widespread in the future. It also resonates with last year's debate in Ireland about the issue of grade inflation. Introducing a research component into the undergraduate curriculum could be one way to improve students' skills in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing. In 2005, Trinity College Dublin launched a summer programme offering undergraduate students, typically from Science and Engineering, the opportunity to work in research for an 11 week period, on projects in laboratory environments.

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.