In one study, reading a story to preschoolers about a character who struggled with waiting but eventually found it energizing increased children’s own ability to wait longer for a larger candy reward. According to another study, assigning middle schoolers to think and write about their core values during a series of 15-minute exercises increased academic achievement for minority students and their later college enrollment by more than 10 percentage points(!). A third example found that a detailed two-hour goal-setting exercise increased struggling college students’ by 0.8 points, more than half of a standard deviation. The sizes of these effects are off the charts, even compared to programs that cost thousands of dollars per student, but they are estimated using small samples.
a couple of exercises lasting less than a few hours can consistently generate even small long-term impacts, we shouldn’t hold back from providing them to every student in the country. The time and monetary costs are small. The likelihood of causing long-term harm seems small, as well. We could even iterate over time on what works best, testing each intervention against a newer edition to boost benefits and experience over time.
Nudging with in-person support also shows more promise than nudging without it. In the H&R Block FAFSA experiment, providing information and encouragement to apply for college financial aid had no impact on applying or enrollment, while having a tax professional walk someone through the process did. As a follow-up, Reuben Ford and I incorporated the college application process into the high school curriculum, such that graduating seniors were provided in-person assistance over three workshops to help choose a program they would likely get into, apply to that program, and apply for financial aid. College enrollment increased by 5 percentage points overall and by 9 percentage points among those not enrolled in university-track courses.
Do We Go From Here?
Low-touch nudges more easily influence one-time actions, such as completing an application or accessing student services, than they influence more ingrained habits or routines. We should continue to test when text messages, reminders, carefully constructed letters, and online exercises generate predictable gains that don’t depend on unknown operational details or unknown population differences. So far, major attempts to scale low-touch nudges have found very small or no short-term impacts.
It is perhaps not surprising that person-to-person interactions are more persuasive compared to text messages, email, or mail. Interventions using real people offering up-close help, such as application assistance, coaching, or tutoring, show more consistent positive impacts than low-touch nudges. They are also more expensive, making them a tougher sell to policymakers. Again, more research is needed to demonstrate when the tradeoff is worthwhile. New technologies, allowing for virtual social interactions or artificial intelligence, may help lower costs.
Shoving restricts options in order to steer individuals towards more desirable behavior. There are some good examples of shoves in education policy: prohibiting the use of smartphones or computers in classrooms; making class attendance mandatory; and imposing homework assignment deadlines spread evenly throughout the term, as opposed to any time before the end of the course. In all three of these cases (evaluated with random assignment), academic grades improved. We don’t know for sure whether these restrictions make students better off, but many students would a
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