Nudge
Think you might want to read this book?
Nudge is a great book for teachers and administrators as we think about how to make learning more accessible to all. If we see ourselves as “choice architects” more and purveyors of knowledge less, our students will certainly be better off and Thaler and Cass do a good job explaining what choice architecture looks like. This is a great read for any educator looking to set up relevant choices for their students and/or teachers.
What Would Socrates Ask?
How well do we use statistics to encourage our students to stay in school?
What are the strategies to nudge students towards, but not give them, the answers?
How does your school incentivize coaching and club sponsorships?
What if the rough draft and revision process were applied to all forms of assessments?
What if all units were rolled out with default and optional assessment choices?
Research
The academic effort of college students is influenced by their peers, so much so that the random assignments of first-year students to dormitories or roommates can have big consequences for their grades and hence on their future projects.
If choice architects want to shift behavior and to do so with a nudge, they might be able to achieve this by simply informing people about what others are thinking and doing.
Concepts
Choice Architect: a person with the responsibility for organizing the context in which people make decisions.
Planning Fallacy: the systematic tendency toward unrealistic optimism about the time it takes to complete projects.
Loss Averse: the prospect of losing something makes you twice as miserable as the prospect of gaining the same thing makes you happy.
Mental Accounting: the system (sometimes implicit) that households use to evaluate, regulate, and process their home budget.
Collective Conservatism: the tendency of groups to stick to established patterns even as new needs arise.
Identity-based cognition: to work with, rather than against, people’s sense of who they are with regards to their choices.
Post Completion Error: When you have finished your main task, you tend to forget things relating to previous steps.
Present-biased: put undue weight on things they can have now versus things they can only get later.
Quotes from the authors
“… people are most likely to need a nudge when decisions require scarce attention, when decisions are difficult, when people do not get prompt feedback, and when they have trouble translating aspects of the situation into terms that they can easily understand.”
“All organizations work better if everyone is empowered to speak up when the boss is about to make a mistake. And checklists can provide a kind of choice architecture for choice architects….”
“Learning is most likely if people get immediate, clear feedback after each try.”
“So, if you remember just one thing from this book, let it be this. If you want to encourage people to do something, Make It Easy.”
“…the first mantra of nudging is to make it easy to take the desired action. A good complement to this advice is to make the desired activity fun.”
Organizations/schools working on answers
Gateways to further learning
Referenced books with the potential to impact leading and learning in education
The applicability of this book to education is ….
Resources
