This paper uses insights from behavioral economics to explain a particularly surprising borrowing phenomenon: One in six undergraduate students offered interest-free loans turn them down. Models of impulse control predict that students may optimally reject subsidized loans to avoid excessive consumption during school. Using the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS), we investigate st...

Corrected authors’ contributions MN made substantial contributions to conception and design, acquisition of data, analysis and interpretation of data, and drafted the manuscript. DA made substantial contributions to conception and design, acquisition of data, analysis and interpretation of data. MC made substantial contributions to the inception of the study, revision of the manuscript, and is ...

The effect of educational technologies on learning is an area of active interest. We conducted an experiment to compare the impact of instructional software on student performance. We hypothesize that some of the impact on student performance may reflect the influence of the technology on student subject-related beliefs and that those beliefs may differ by gender. We desired to assess how cours...

The disrupt-then-reframe (DTR) influence technique involves confusing consumers with a disruptive message and then reducing ambiguity by reframing the message. Experiment 1 shows that the DTR technique increases retail sales in a supermarket setting. Experiment 2 shows that the DTR technique increases the willingness to pay to join a student interest group. Experiment 3 shows that the DTR techn...

College completion and success often lag behind college attendance. One theory as to why students do not succeed in college is that they lack key information about how to be successful or fail to act on the information that they have. We present evidence from a randomized experiment which tests the effectiveness of individualized student coaching. Over the course of two separate school years, I...

Growing suspension rates predict major negative life outcomes, including adult incarceration and unemployment. Experiment 1 tested whether teachers (n = 39) could be encouraged to adopt an empathic rather than punitive mindset about discipline-to value students' perspectives and sustain positive relationships while encouraging better behavior. Experiment 2 tested whether an empathic response to...

In an experiment, we study risk-taking of cohabitating student couples, finding that couples’ decisions are closer to risk-neutrality than single partners’ decisions. This finding is similar to earlier experiments with randomly assigned groups, corroborating external validity of earlier results. JEL Classification: C91; C92.

A 2002 Wizard of Oz study showed that emotional scaffolding provided by a human significantly increased children’s persistence in an automated Reading Tutor, as measured by the number of tasks they chose to undertake. We report a 5,965-trial experiment to test a simple automated form of such scaffolding, compared to a control condition without it. 348 children in grades K-4 spent significantly ...

Following Collins’ work [1,2], a design experiment had graduate music students create an on-line journal of peerreviewed articles to introduce them to the professional process. The students reported learning a great deal and the professor found that most produced work that greatly exceeded his expectations. Positive results were independent of previous computing or subject matter experience, an...