Nudging Students' Creative Problem-Solving Skills

Abstract

People often make choices that go against their own best interests. In the controversial bestseller Nudge, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein argue that people can benefit from simple "nudges" to improve their decision-making. In an upper-level undergraduate course on political decision-making, I created a series of assignments around Nudge. In the project, students designed their own "nudges" to solve a variety of political and social problems.Studentsgavethisassignmentravereviews,notonlyforthecoursecontenttheylearned, but also for what they discovered about their connections to society and its problems. In this article, I describe the assignment and report students' evaluations of it.This assignment could be tailored to any course on political behavior, public policy, or public administration.

Field Experiments in a Course on Behavioral Economics: Nudging Students Around Campus

“…There are differences between the behavioral field experiment described in this article relative to Singh and Russo's (2013), Griffin's (2011), and the existing literature. First, students were asked to do field work which required data collection and analysis in addition to developing a research design.…”

“…Downloaded by [Northwestern University] at 19:21 02 January 2015 (Singh and Russo 2013;Griffin 2011). Singh and Russo (2013) required students in an undergraduate development economics course to develop a proposal for a "dream experiment," the best of which had the potential to be funded.…”

“…Singh and Russo (2013) required students in an undergraduate development economics course to develop a proposal for a "dream experiment," the best of which had the potential to be funded. Griffin (2011) developed a series of assignments for her upper-level undergraduate course in political decision-making using the book Nudge by Thaler and Sunstein (2009). Students were asked to develop a proposal in which a nudge was used to solve an assigned social or political problem, defend the proposal, and finally write a paper describing and critiquing their own ideas incorporating the feedback obtained from the class.…”

“…First, students were asked to do field work which required data collection and analysis in addition to developing a research design. Further, the projects of Singh and Russo (2013) and Griffin (2011) were part of advanced undergraduate courses in economics or political science, while the behavioral field experiment here was designed for students who had not previously taken courses in economics, statistics, or psychology. While developing a research proposal requires students to take an active role by identifying relevant research questions, it does not provide students with the experience of taking it to the field and having to overcome the potential for failure.…”

Engaging students as co-producers: A critical reflection on the policy commission model

“…In this context, the student as producer model as advocated by Neary is a subversive one that seeks to challenge the fundamental underpinning of higher education as opposed to merely having a focus on greater levels of student engagement and enabling more student control. This has instead been the approach that has tended to underpin much of the literature which has focused on harnessing student creativity and enthusiasm through the likes of an undergraduate student journal and giving students the control to undertake simulation exercises (Barrios and Weber, 2006; Frombgen et al, 2013; Griffin, 2011; Obendorf and Randerson, 2012). Within the political science learning and teaching communities, the roots of this work on students as co-creators or co-producers of learning can partly be traced to the broader civic engagement literature (e.g.…”