PROJECT SUMMARY
Teachers in a summer school program for high school students provided brief, individualized, messages for parents with information about their child’s performance and behavior in school on a weekly basis.
IMPACT
Providing parents with individualized messages increased the probability a student earned credit for each class by 6.5 percentage points – a 41% reduction in failure rates.
Behavioural Insights Projects
Discover projects applying behavioural science to policy from around the world. Add your own projects, whether completed or still ongoing, to contribute knowledge on BI applications across different countries, policy areas, and topics of interest.
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To promote college access and affordability, education tax credits help with the cost of college by reducing the amount of tax owed. The most generous Federal higher education tax credit, the American opportunity tax credit (AOTC), is a maximum annual credit of $2,500 per eligible student. Yet, many eligible students (or their families) do not claim the credit. Among eligible students, national estimates indicate that 46 percent of independent students and 56 percent of dependent students take…
Avoiding electrical waste and promoting the manufacture of and demand for sustainable electrical products are key goals for the Federal Government. To this end, transparency for consumers is to be improved. Whether a lifespan label for electrical products can help achieve this aim was tested in an empirical study. The findings show that a lifespan label would lead to 3 out of 100 consumers opting for a more expensive product with a longer lifespan. When the lifespan was combined with information…
BI Project
Effective position of call-to-action: Is the response rate higher if the call-to-action appears the…
How can response rates to questionnaires be increased? In the first quarter of 2023, some of the participants in a CBS survey received a letter in which the call-to-action appeared as far as possible at the top of the letter. The other participants received standard letters. The analyses showed that the standard letters produced a significantly higher response rate than the letters in which the call-to-action was placed at the top.
Why this experiment was conducted: high response rate is…
BI Project
Less waste placed next to underground containers: is there a reduction in the amount of waste left…
The Municipality of Dordrecht organised a competition titled The Cleanest Neighbourhood in Dordrecht. The aim was to get residents to place less rubbish next to underground waste containers. As a result of the experiment, the amount of waste left next to bins decreased and a new social norm was established.
Why this experiment was conducted: rubbish left next to waste containers
Bin liners and other bags containing residual and larger waste left next to underground containers rank amongst the…
BI Project
Micro-SMEs ‘green’ their business: how to increase the likelihood of micro-SMEs applying…
An online experiment investigated how behavioural techniques could be used to increase the likelihood of companies with 2 to 10 employees applying for assistance under the Subsidy Scheme Improving Sustainability of SMEs (SVM ). The results show that an updated version of the website helps to clarify the subsidy. This effect is not reflected in the likelihood of these micro-SMEs actually applying for the subsidy.
Why this experiment was conducted: SVM scheme not being fully utilised
It is…
Challenge
At West Kentucky Community & Technical College (WKCTC), many students were failing or withdrawing from courses, but few used the free tutoring services available on campus. Additionally, faculty had the potential to play a large role in helping facilitate student engagement in tutoring services through referrals, but they weren’t involved enough to have an impact.
Design
To better connect students to campus tutoring services, a series of nine behaviorally designed emails were sent to…
SIMPLESMENTE is an acronym formed by the initials of 12 mechanisms studied by the behavioral sciences. SIMPLESMENTE is an application to simplify and support the use of behavioral sciences in public policy designs. Based on a guided script, users define a problem of interest in public policies and are encouraged to assume the user's perspective. They are invited to apply a series of references, based on evidence and international practice, to improve their understanding of the situation and…
We conducted a systematic search for an overview of reviews of scholarly evidence on scale up, and 11 practice interviews with behaviour science researchers and practitioners to identify the factors and activities that influence the scale up of behaviour change interventions, learn about scale up, its challenges, and useful frameworks, identify which behaviour to target with an intervention, assess the feasibility of different intervention ideas, and select a scalable behaviour change…
BI Project
Can Visual Cues to Portion Size Reduce the Number of Portions of Consumed? Two Randomized Controlled…
Methods
Two preregistered randomized controlled trials (N = 253 and N = 674) measured consumption in a lab and the home environment. Cues were salient, labeled stripes that demarcated single portions. Participants were randomized to cue condition or control. Consumption was measured without awareness.
Results
The main preregistered effect of the visual cue was not statistically significant. There was some variation by subgroup. In Study 1, men were more likely to eat the whole can of potato…