Can a simple email nudge students to seek study help?

Students don't always access the help that they need. Often, it's because they don't realise what support is available to them. I'm interested in any way that we can make it easier for students to access support that enhances their learning and helps them to succeed. So, I was really interested to read this 2020 article by Rita Balaban and Patrick Conway (both University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), published in the AEA Papers and Proceedings (ungated earlier version here).

Balaban and Conway evaluate the impact of emails (passive nudges) reminding students about two economics support programmes that were available on the UNC Chapel Hill campus. The two programmes were the 'EconAid Center', which provided walk-in peer tutoring during weekdays and early evenings, and a series of five hour-long learning strategy seminars run by the co-authors. Students were randomly assigned to one of two email groups, one of which received weekly reminders about the EconAid Center, while the other received reminders before each learning strategy seminar. The evaluation focuses on the 199 students who consented to participate.

Those emails represent a very light-touch intervention. But did they work? The nudges did get students to engage with the programmes, but only for female students and first-year students, who were more likely to engage with the EconAid Center if they received the email nudges. Female students and students of colour were actually less likely to attend the learning strategy seminars if they received the email nudges. So, at best a mixed result.

Turning to whether the two programmes worked to improve grades:

The coefficients corresponding to the effects of the support programs on performance are positive but insignificantly different from zero.

Now, the small sample of 199 students (and the much smaller samples for subgroups) may simply have been too small to estimate the effects precisely. Participation in the programmes was also relatively low. A larger study might therefore do a better job of telling us whether the programmes actually had an effect or not.

So, file this study away under possibilities for the future. Light-touch nudges may help some students take the first step towards seeking support. A natural extension today would be to test whether similar nudges can steer students towards effective human or AI-assisted study support.