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The Use of Behavioural Economics to Encourage First-Year Completion and Retention

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Damian T. Gordon
Damian T. Gordon

Behavioural economics focuses on how emotional, psychological, and social factors influence decision making, and can be applied to education. Specifically, using heuristics like rules of thumb and framing how concepts are presented can motivate students to study, participate, and complete assignments. This document describes a study where students were given flexible assignment deadlines but shown how many peers had completed each task. Assignments emphasized responsible teamwork and avoiding plagiarism. Feedback compared students to their peers on evaluation criteria. Early results suggest this approach may help improve first-year completion and retention.

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The Use of Behavioural Economics to Encourage First-Year Completion and Retention Damian Gordon Dublin Institute of Technology, School of Computing, Kevin St., Dublin 8, Ireland Damian.Gordon@ dit.ie Abstract Behavioural Economics focuses on modelling the decision-making process of individuals, by exploring the emotional, psychological, and social factors that lead to those decisions. Although it primarily focuses on economic decisions nonetheless there is significant potential in the educational field to use the key themes of behavioural economics. A key challenge in all levels of education is in motivating students to study, to participate in class, and to complete their assignments. Behavioural economics provides two key themes that can be used to achieve this, first, the use of heuristics, the rules-of-thumb and mental shortcuts people use when making decisions, and second, framing, the set of general, and generalized, concepts that individuals use in how they understand and think about reality. By combining these two themes, it is possible to present lectures, assignments, and feedback in such a manner as to induce the students engage and participate in the learning process, and particularly in the peer-learning process, in a full-engaged fashion. Additionally Conditional Expected Utility, Prospect Theory, and Intertemporal Choice, provide specific algorithms that may be used to devise specific prompts, and terminology, to aid students in achieving their potential. In this research students were presented with a number of laboratory activities with flexible deadlines, but on the assignment page, a notice was placed after each activity indicating the total number of students who have already completed and submitted each activity. Each activity required a declaration at the start of the assignment that no plagiarism had taken place, and that teamwork would be undertaken responsibly, videos developed by the lecturer were presented to the class and made available to the students for reference on these topics. Some activities were characterised by their relevance to the exams, whereas only offered slightly more marks. Additionally feedback was presented in such a manner that each criterion of evaluation was characterised in comparison with all of the other students in the class. Preliminary results indicate promising potential for this approach.

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The Use of Behavioural Economics to Encourage First-Year Completion and Retention

  • 1. The Use of Behavioural Economics to Encourage First-Year Completion and Retention Damian Gordon Dublin Institute of Technology, School of Computing, Kevin St., Dublin 8, Ireland Damian.Gordon@ dit.ie Abstract Behavioural Economics focuses on modelling the decision-making process of individuals, by exploring the emotional, psychological, and social factors that lead to those decisions. Although it primarily focuses on economic decisions nonetheless there is significant potential in the educational field to use the key themes of behavioural economics. A key challenge in all levels of education is in motivating students to study, to participate in class, and to complete their assignments. Behavioural economics provides two key themes that can be used to achieve this, first, the use of heuristics, the rules-of-thumb and mental shortcuts people use when making decisions, and second, framing, the set of general, and generalized, concepts that individuals use in how they understand and think about reality. By combining these two themes, it is possible to present lectures, assignments, and feedback in such a manner as to induce the students engage and participate in the learning process, and particularly in the peer-learning process, in a full-engaged fashion. Additionally Conditional Expected Utility, Prospect Theory, and Intertemporal Choice, provide specific algorithms that may be used to devise specific prompts, and terminology, to aid students in achieving their potential. In this research students were presented with a number of laboratory activities with flexible deadlines, but on the assignment page, a notice was placed after each activity indicating the total number of students who have already completed and submitted each activity. Each activity required a declaration at the start of the assignment that no plagiarism had taken place, and that teamwork would be undertaken responsibly, videos developed by the lecturer were presented to the class and made available to the students for reference on these topics. Some activities were characterised by their relevance to the exams, whereas only offered slightly more marks. Additionally feedback was presented in such a manner that each criterion of evaluation was characterised in comparison with all of the other students in the class. Preliminary results indicate promising potential for this approach.