A magic in improving retention and possibly also graduation rates---UT Austin’s experiment

Poor retention and graduation rates are a perennial headache for American higher education. According to a latests report issued by Complete College America (http://completecollege.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/4-Year-Myth.pdf ), ontime graduation rates of full time students in 1-2 year cerntificate programs, 2 year associate programs, 4 year bachelor’s programs in non-flagship public universities, and 4 year bachelor’s degrees in flagship or very high research public universities are respectively 15.9%, 5%, 19%, 36%.

But are there effective ways to improve the retention and graduation rates? A recent large-scale interference experiment conducted in University of Texas Austin sends an exciting message. (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/18/magazine/who-gets-to-graduate.html?_r=0 )

Starting in 1999,  chemistry professor David Laude, now senior vice provost for enrollment and graduation management, began to teach the disadvantaged students Chemistry 301 in a small class, and through other intervention measures like peer mentoring, extra tutoring help, engaged faculty advisers and community-building exercises, these students caught up with others.

But UT Austin has over 8,000 freshmen each year, and how to help those in need in such a large scale? A psychological researcher at U.T. named David Yeager, a 32-year-old assistant professor who is emerging as one of the world’s leading experts on the psychology of education, has come to help. Yeager, Greg Walton and Geoffrey Cohen (all from Stanford), had conducted experiments in an elite university, in 3 high schools, and in a community-college. Their short-time experiment (lasting less than one hour) designed to change students’ perception in terms of belonging and ability all had positive results. Let me end the introduction by quoting New York Times’ report:

In April 2012, Ritter (a Vice Provost of UT Austin) asked Yeager to test his intervention on the more than 8,000 teenagers who made up the newly admitted U.T. class of 2016. It would be one of the largest randomized experiments ever undertaken by social or developmental psychologists. And it would need to be ready to go in three weeks.

Yeager and Ritter decided that the best way to deliver the chosen messages to the incoming students was to make them a part of the online pre-orientation that every freshman was required to complete before arriving on campus. That May, rising freshmen began receiving the usual welcome-to-U.T. emails from the registrar’s office, inviting them to log on to U.T.’s website and complete a series of forms and tasks. Wedged in between the information about the meningococcal vaccine requirements and the video about the U.T. honor code was a link to Yeager’s interactive presentation about the “U.T. Mindset.”

Students were randomly sorted into four categories. A “belonging” treatment group read messages from current students explaining that they felt alone and excluded when they arrived on campus, but then realized that everyone felt that way and eventually began to feel at home. A “mind-set” treatment group read an article about the malleability of the brain and how practice makes it grow new connections, and then read messages from current students stating that when they arrived at U.T., they worried about not being smart enough, but then learned that when they studied they grew smarter. A combination treatment group received a hybrid of the belonging and mind-set presentations. And finally, a control group read fairly banal reflections from current students stating that they were surprised by Austin’s culture and weather when they first arrived, but eventually they got used to them. Students in each group were asked, after clicking through a series of a dozen or so web pages, to write their own reflections on what they’d read in order to help future students. The whole intervention took between 25 and 45 minutes for students to complete, and more than 90 percent of the incoming class completed it.

In January 2013, when Yeager analyzed the first-semester data, he saw the advantaged students’ results were exactly the same as they were every year. No matter which message they saw in the pre-orientation presentation, 90 percent of that group was on track. Similarly, the disadvantaged students in the control group, who saw the bland message about adjusting to Austin’s culture and weather, did the same as disadvantaged students usually did: 82 percent were on track. But the disadvantaged students who had experienced the belonging and mind-set messages did significantly better: 86 percent of them had completed 12 credits or more by Christmas. They had cut the gap between themselves and the advantaged students in half.