Starting with an A

“Imagine a classroom where everyone started off an academic year with an “A” grade, and in order to keep the grade, a pupil had to show continuous improvement throughout the year. In this classroom, the teacher would have to dock points from a pupil’s assessment when his or her performance or achievement was inadequate, and pupils would work to maintain their high mark rather than to work up to it. How would this affect effort, expectations, performance, and assessment relative to current practice?”

“Imagine a classroom where everyone started off an academic year with an “A” grade, and in order to keep the grade, a pupil had to show continuous improvement throughout the year. In this classroom, the teacher would have to dock points from a pupil’s assessment when his or her performance or achievement was inadequate, and pupils would work to maintain their high mark rather than to work up to it. How would this affect effort, expectations, performance, and assessment relative to current practice?”

                   Image by ludwg

This is one of the questions we pose in our upcoming paper, due to be published next month, which explores the application of behavioural insight to educational policy and practice.

Specifically, we are concerned with the socio-economic attainment gap - the difference in performance between pupils from affluent backgrounds and those from deprived backgrounds.  We’ve been working with the Vodafone Foundation Germany to understand the education context in Germany, where the gap is particularly severe.

While no country has yet to achieve a fully equitable system where educational attainment is not correlated with socioeconomic background, the UK, Germany, the USA, France, Austria, Bulgaria, Belgium, and New Zealand, among many others, are worse than the OECD average.  So while our paper reviews the German context in particular, the message is applicable across many different parts of the globe.

So what is the big idea with everyone starting with an A?  Regular readers of this blog might recognise that this approach taps into our tendency to want to avoid a loss – more so than we want to receive an equivalent gain – a tendency known as loss aversion.

Loss aversion just one of many behavioural insights that we explore, where the term behavioural insight is used to describe the application of behavioural science (comprising many different fields, including behavioural economics and social psychology among others).

Our paper includes the distillation of academic theory that would be expected, but we also turned to educators to get their perspectives on the practicality and value of applying behavioural insight in the classroom.  To do this, we conducted focus groups with teachers in Berlin (see Josef Lentsch’s blog post from earlier this year for a glimpse into that experience), ran a survey with YouGov to explore views of teachers in England, and drew on a report that Vodafone Foundation Germany published earlier this year about teacher, parent, and pupil perspectives on a range of educational issues.

The paper be published in both English and German, and we’ll provide another update closer to the date with a link from which you will be able to download the report.

Nathalie Spencer is a Senior Researcher in the RSA Social Brain Centre