UDL/behaviour books

Behavioural economics and education

Posted on by

Currently, it seems Learning/Instructional Design is borrowing ideas from fields like User Experience and Customer Experience in the business world. I suggest we add another field to that list: Behavioural economics.

Behavioural economics is studying how real people make choices. Not conveniently-rational, utility-optimising, economic-theory people. But irrational, real people.

two pathwaysThese are the same people we teach every day. Real people who don’t all love to hear a teacher speak or love to write notes; who don’t all rationally stick to deadlines — the people at the fringes, as well as those in the middle.

That is why I was so excited to see choice architecture mentioned in the wonderful book UDL in the Cloud: How to Design and Deliver Online Education Using Universal Design for Learning by Katie Novak and Tom Thibodeau. Some people have said choice architecture and behavioural economics are the same thing.

Richard Thaler (who happens to be the co-author of a behavioural economics book called Nudge) said,

“If anything you do influences the way people choose, then you are a choice architect”

To be expert learning designers, then, we need to learn more about what influences the choices people make.

Adopting a UDL (universal design for learning) framework in the way we design learning requires an appreciation that learning is all about multiple means; it is all about choices.

Here are some ideas that have been jostling for space in my head as behavioural economics gets folded into designing a learning experience.

Learners’ choice to complete learning tasks vs other tasks

Two concepts from behavioural economics that could help are:

  • Loss Aversion — that we focus more on what we may lose than what we may gain,
  • the Endowment Effect — that we value something more because we own it.

An example from Dan Ariely’s book Predictably Irrational tells of a study he was involved in where die-hard Duke basketball fans were allocated tickets to a Duke basketball game by lottery. After the lottery, he called students who didn’t get tickets and asked them how much they would pay for a ticket. On average it was $175.00. He also asked people who had won a ticket how much they would sell it for. On average it was $2,400.00. Even though the allocation of tickets was random, those who had the tickets valued them more. He concludes this is because their feelings about the tickets have changes because they own them.

Leap with me to an education setting. What if we gave everyone full grades and a certificate at the start of a course? Then, if learners completed assessments at a level that matched the grades they had already been given, they got to keep them.

Could these same effects happen in education with something like grades and completion certificates? Would learners value the qualifications and good grades more because they felt they already owned them? Would they focus more on what they would lose when deciding to complete coursework or procrastinate? It is a small change, but it could have a big difference in the way learners approach completing courses.

How about another example related to choices made to complete assessment.

The power of expectations.

behavioural learningYou may be familiar with this power already. Sometimes we feel it in relation to price. The more we pay for something, the better we think it is. It also happens in social situations. If you get dragged to a party you think will be bad, it probably will be. If you are looking forward to going out for dinner, it will probably be a good time.

Let’s look at another of Ariely’s experiments. This time it involves beer and vinegar.

Ariely tells of an experiment where they offered US College students two samples of beer and asked them to choose which one they would like. In one condition, students tasted the two samples without being told anything about them. One was beer, the other was a sample of beer that had two drops of balsamic vinegar added. In this blind condition, most students preferred the beer with balsamic vinegar.

In the second condition, students were offered the same two samples of beer, but this time they were told which one had vinegar added. This time, when students tried the beer with vinegar they grimaced and said they preferred the regular beer. Their expectations affected their experience.

Let’s leap to education again.

Assume you’re a student and you find writing an essay boring and tedious. You look at the options for submitting an assessment for one of your courses and you see an essay. “Again?”, you think, “this is going to be horrible”.

But, then you see there are multiple means of completing this assessment. You show you’ve met learning outcomes by drawing something, building something, recording something, singing something, annotating something.

“Oh”, you think, “building something is fun, I’m going to do that!” Your expectation then is priming you to have a more positive experience. You choose the option you expect you would enjoy more and chances are you will. All because the designer of that course was thinking of ways to give you multiple means of engagement, representation, action, and expression.

Don’t we owe it to everyone we design courses for to be the best choice architects we can be? Understanding not only what choices to offer, but how people make choices in their learning.

I think so.

Postscript: I’m not trying to say these ideas are capital T truths. A party can be better than you expected, there may be some things you own that you don’t overvalue. Rather, there are people out there studying how people make choices whose research should be of interest to anyone who designs learning.

 

Books mentioned in this post:

Ariely, D. (2010) Predictably Irrational: the hidden forces that shape our decisions (revised and expanded edition). USA: HarperCollins Publishers
Novak, K., & Thibodeau, T. (2016) UDL in the cloud: how to design and deliver online education using Universal Design for Learning. Massachusetts, USA: CAST Professional Publishing
Thaler, R. H., & Sunstein, C. R. (2009) Nudge: improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness. UK: Penguin Books Ltd

Photo attribution:

Desire path: by wetwebwork (2008) under CC.2.0 (found on Photosforclass.com

Image of book spines: by the author

read more
Posted in
armchair

Pay attention to the task

Posted on by

Last time I wrote about how we focus our attention — what we pay attention to. This time let’s talk about the intensity part of attention — how much attention we pay.

So, what determines how much attention we pay to a task? Well, some of it is related to the type of task. Some activities require us to pay more attention than others. So, when we are designing them as part of a learning experience, it helps to design something that is both worthy of attention, and requires attention to complete.

To illustrate the impact that a task has on how much attention you pay, try this “armchair experiment” from Daniel Kahneman’s (1973) book Attention and Effort:

armchair

 

“First, try to mentally multiply 83 by 27. Having completed this task, imagine that you are going to be given four numbers, and that your life depends on your ability to retain them for ten seconds. The numbers are seven, two, five, nine. Having completed the second task, it may appear believable that, even to save one's life, one cannot work as hard in retaining four digits as one must work to complete a mental multiplication of two-digit numbers pg.15.”

 

read more
Posted in
goldfish

The goldfish and the gate

Posted on by

You might have seen the study last year that claimed our attention span was now less than that of a goldfish. You may have also watched a movie for over an hour. How does that work?

goldfish

We all know, generally, what it means to pay attention. But hold on, what is attention? How do we pay it?

In some of my research I was faced with the same question. What is attention? One way of thinking about attention that I liked was written by Daniel Kahneman in his book, Attention and Effort (1973). He talks about attention as a limited resource. It is the amount of effort, or cognitive capacity, someone allocates to a task. It has focus and intensity.

The focus part, is the focus (haha) of this post.

If we think of attention as a limited resource, perhaps that explains why we talk about paying attention. We talk about it like other things some people see as limited, like money, and time.

Rightly or wrongly, phrases such as, pay attention, conjure up images of exchange. Usually, when we pay for something, we’re expecting to get something in return. Think about it in a teaching context. If you are expecting people to pay you their attention, what are you giving them that is worth spending their attention on?

Because attention is limited, we can’t pay the same amount of attention to everything at the same time. Sometimes we have to choose the focus of our attention. Some researchers describe this choice about what we pay attention to as a gateway. If something gets through the gate, we pay attention to it. (How much attention we pay is the intensity part, by the way).

gate

Now, you might be thinking about how you get through the gate? Well, give yourself some credit, you probably know most of that already. People have been paying attention to you for years. But here is a recap:

  • Relevance is near the top of the list for opening the gate. Would you pay for something you don’t care about?
  • So is novelty. How many times have you paid for something just to try it out?
  • Estimated effort and estimated enjoyment are also up there. Would you (willingly) pay for something you thought wasn’t going to be enjoyable, or that you thought would be too difficult to even use?

So, the next time you find yourself talking about people not paying attention, have a think. Their attention is probably doing just fine; you just have to figure out how to get that gate open.

 

References:

Kahneman, D. (1973). Attention and effort. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Images sourced using PhotosForClass.com
Goldfish: Gullfiskur by úlfhams_víkingur (2009) under CC
Gate: Gate To Beach by Tracy Hunter (2008) under CC

read more
Posted in