Intervention (Hidden)
Studying is a prime example of an investment decision with upfront costs in exchange for delayed benefits. Students need to exert study effort and invest in learning inputs before reaching desirable learning outcomes. Recent studies have shown, however, that many students exhibit self-control problems in how effort is allocated over time (Augenblick et al. 2015; Wong 2008}. They tend to renege on earlier commitments and exert lower effort than was initially deemed optimal. One often-cited reason for this may be that students become demotivated from feeling that progress toward the distant goal is slow and uncertain, an issue referred to as the starting problem (Heath et al. 1999). This poses a challenge for both researchers and educators: how to make study progress more salient and immediate, while simultaneously highlighting to students how this progress contributes to reaching the ultimate goal.
This research project will leverage a new educational technology, called the MicroApp, to examine the effect on student effort when past study commitments by students are presented as real-time virtual pacesetters (also known as rabbits). In sports, a rabbit is the colloquial term used for a runner who is instructed to run at the exact pace needed to finish at a certain time. In education, pacesetters can provide a succinct and salient reference point that visualizes the preferred study pace envisioned by the past self. The distant study goal is transformed into a continuous and easy-to-interpret task that activates students directly: stay close to your own pacesetter if you want to reach your initial study goal. As the pacesetter is, by design, not prone to self-control problems, falling behind immediately makes salient to students that they are reneging on earlier commitments. Under the assumption that students exhibit reference-dependent preferences, loss aversion makes falling behind painful and triggers the student to catch up and exert effort. The pacesetter can thus serve as an internal commitment mechanism whereby future selves are triggered to follow the pacesetter and, in the process, implement the initial optimal study plan.
The MicroApp (www.microapp.nl) is an online platform where students can design- and implement their own study plan by self-selecting the course content they want to work on. The app has a built-in algorithm that automatically matches selections with abundant practice- and recap material, all supplemented with step-wise feedback. The MicroApp is developed and programmed entirely by ourselves, yielding full control and ownership over all features and content.
The study and the MicroApp will be implemented during the first semester of the 2018-2019 academic year in a large first-year introductory course in microeconomics at the University of Groningen. Each week, all students will be requested to complete short time-use surveys. There will be three experimental conditions. In the first condition, the control group, we only request from students to fill in the surveys and to formulate a broad goal regarding MicroApp usage in the upcoming week. In the second condition, the planner condition, we additionally ask students to write down their study commitments for the upcoming week. The third condition, the rabbit condition, builds on the planner condition and uses the written-down study commitments as input for the construction of an individualized pacesetter. The pacesetter will be presented in real-time as feedback, and students can at any time see where they stand compared to their own pacesetter.
During the course, all students have access to the MicroApp, but are presented different versions based on the experimental conditions. The baseline version is the version available to students in the control group, which contains all content and features, except for information on study commitments and pacesetters. The baseline version only shows general progress toward the set goal. In the planner condition, a version is available that additionally refers to the study commitments of the student, as written down in the time-use survey. Finally, the version for the rabbit condition builds on the planner condition and additionally offers the pacesetter feature in real-time. By comparing usage of the MicroApp across all three conditions, we get a detailed picture of study effort and the distribution of this effort over time. Furthermore, by matching the data with the time-use surveys, we can check how usage of the MicroApp affects investments in other learning inputs, such as attending lectures and reading the textbook. The data can also be matched with data on learning outcomes (e.g., course grades).
Following the typology in Harrison and List (2004), we aim to implement a framed field experiment. Students will be notified beforehand that, since the MicroApp is a new educational technology, we are working with different versions of the app in order to find the optimal user experience. The short weekly time-use surveys are positioned in a similar way. It will also be communicated that it is randomly determined which version is made available to each student.
In the study, we distinguish between the following three conditions:
*Condition I (control): access to the baseline version of the MicroApp. The baseline version contains all practice material and feedback, but only general information on progress toward the stated study goal. Students in the control condition complete a shortened version of the weekly time-use surveys, which does not elaborate on the study commitments for the upcoming week.
*Condition II ("planner''): same as the control condition, but in this condition students do receive a request in the weekly time-use survey to write down the study commitments for the upcoming week. Specifically, we ask the students to formulate daily study goals in hours (which need to add up to the overall study goal) and how they wish to allocate these hours over the day. The planner version of the MicroApp is the same as the baseline version, but additionally contains information on the study commitments.
*Condition III ("rabbit''): same as the planner condition, but in this condition the study goal and study commitments will be used as input to construct the individualized virtual pacesetter. The rabbit version of the MicroApp visualizes the pacesetter in real-time as a feedback feature.