Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Panel: Behavior Nudges and Wise Interventions that Promote Post-Secondary Retention and Achievement

(Education)

Considerations of how people react and respond to policies and programs have always informed policymaking. However, it is not until recently that behaviorally-informed policymaking has permeated the policy process in significant ways. Specifically, insights from social psychology, economics, and other behavioral sciences have begun to increasingly influence the policy process across the world. The Behavioral Insights team in the UK, and the newly formed Social Behavioral Sciences Team in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) showcase this renewed interest in understanding the behavioral foundations of public policies. This panel aims to examine such recent efforts to design and rigorously evaluate the impact of behaviorally-informed educational interventions to promote positive postsecondary student outcomes in the U.S. This panel includes three papers that feature different educational interventions that examine specific, embedded behavioral insights for promoting student success in college. Each of these papers approach student success from a unique theoretical perspective and are implemented in a variety of university settings: broad access public universities, highly-selective private universities to small liberal arts colleges in the US. Collectively, these papers showcase the potential for integrating behavioral insights into the design and evaluation of interventions that promote retention, achievement, and other significant postsecondary student outcomes. The first paper, “Effects of a Social-psychological Intervention on Persistence and Achievement of Ethnic-minority and First-generation Students in a Broad Access Public University,” uses a double-blind, randomized control trial to evaluate the impact of a social-belonging intervention with a new student population that has not yet been examined. The intervention, designed to promote students’ social belonging on campus, increased student achievement and retention among ethnic-minority and first-generation students in a broad access, public university in Chicago. This research is timely as the number of college dropouts has increased significantly in the last decade. Of those who enroll in college, 30 percent dropout within the first three years (Lfill, Radford, Wu, Cataldi, Wilson & Hill, 2016). The second paper, “Revising the Letter: Effects of Revising the Notification Letter for Students Placed on Academic Probation at a Selective Private University,” also uses a randomized experimental research design to examine whether re-framing the language in a letter sent to students placed on probation can increase persistence and academic engagement in a selective private university. Finally, the third paper, “Demand for Peer Tutoring and Its Effects", also uses a randomized experimental design to evaluate the effects of three different informational messages that incentivize the take-up of tutoring services on students’ academic outcomes in a small liberal arts college. Education policies designed to reduce inequality in education outcomes should acknowledge the psychological processes that hamper at-risk students and incorporate psychologically sound intervention practices—drawing from randomized experiments like these interventions—to ensure that disadvantaged students are afforded the resources, resilience, and motivation to persist and succeed in college.