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.