Getting more qualified students to enroll in advanced courses may be as simple as giving them a gentle nudge to alert them that they are ready for the challenge.
That’s the conclusion researchers drew after testing an automatic notification tool they built into the online course planner in 44 school districts.
The researchers, from the American Institutes for Research, found that 9th graders who scored at grade level on state tests were more likely to plan to take advanced courses later in high school if they received a pop-up alert that informed them their academic history suggested they would succeed in those classes and recommended a class for them to consider.
“Traditional identification processes [for advanced courses] often rely on teacher or counselor recommendations,” said Megan Austin, a principal researcher at AIR and co-author of the study. “They can be less accurate and rely on information that reinforces [existing] course-taking patterns.”
But a nudge that relies on consistent identification criteria, like test results, may help more students recognize their capabilities, she said.
The research comes as states and districts weigh how to encourage more qualified students to take Advanced Placement, dual-credit, and other higher-level courses in hopes that doing so will reroute their academic trajectory in high school and beyond. Those strategies include automatically enrolling students in advanced courses, essentially requiring them to opt out instead of opting in.
The success of the nudge experiment suggests schools may have an additional, lighter-lift tool for overcoming hurdles that keep students from enrolling in more rigorous classes, the AIR researchers wrote in the study, published in a working paper that has not yet undergone peer review.
“While research shows these [automatic-enrollment] policies increase advanced-course participation, it can take years to develop and pass legislation and implement new policies, which presents a barrier to scalability,” researchers wrote. “Consequently, we developed an alternative, rapidly scalable approach.”
Testing a low-lift academic acceleration strategy
The experiment, conducted during the 2023-24 school year, used a large-scale, randomized controlled trial model, which allowed researchers to compare the behavior of students who received the pop-up messages to that of a control group of peers who did not.
About 25,000 9th-grade students at 110 high schools in 44 districts who tested proficient or advanced on state tests in math or English language arts were slotted into three groups: those who received a short notification, those who received a longer notification, and those who received no notification at all. Researchers controlled for student and school characteristics related to race, ethnicity, gender, disability, and English learner status.
Notification Text Alerts |
| Shorter form: [Student first name], your academic performance in math/English language arts shows you have the ability to do well in advanced courses. Consider enrolling in an advanced math course next year, such as [insert relevant courses here]. Your parents/guardians, teachers, and counselors can help you learn more about this option and about supports available to help you succeed in an advanced course. |
| Longer form: [Student first name], your academic performance in math/English language arts shows you have the ability to do well in advanced courses. Consider enrolling in an advanced math course next year, such as [insert relevant courses here]. Taking advanced courses in high school can help you get into college, do well in college, and be ready for a career whether you plan to go to college or not. Your parents/guardians, teachers, and counselors can help you learn more about this option and about supports available to help you succeed in an advanced course. |
Neither the long-form nor the short-form message increased students’ chances of taking advanced courses in 10th grade, but researchers found students who received either alert were more likely to plan to take advanced courses later on in 11th grade.
Students who were sent the short-form message were 22 percentage points more likely to plan to take any advanced course in 11th grade, 13 percentage points more likely to plan an advanced ELA course, and 24 percentage points more likely to plan an advanced math course than students in the control group.
Students who were sent the longer-form message were 24 percentage points more likely to plan to take any advanced course in 11th grade and 24 percentage points more likely to plan an advanced math course than students in the control group. The longer message did not have a statistically significant effect on students’ plans to take advanced ELA classes.
Eliminating hurdles to advanced coursework
While the study identified some promise in the notification tool, it also highlighted some limitations.
Researchers did not determine whether students who planned to take advanced courses in 11th grade eventually did so. And separate research has suggested academic acceleration may need to happen earlier to affect students’ college going, persistence, and post secondary course selection.
The effects of the notifications may have been limited because many students, teachers, and parents failed to log on to the course-planning tool. For example, while about 88% of eligible students were scheduled to receive an ELA course notification, only about half of those students saw the alert because many failed to log on to the platform.
In a follow-up survey, many school counselors said they did not see the pop-up alerts on students accounts or click on the messages to read them. Two-thirds of counselors said at least a few students mentioned the alerts to them.
Some counselors said they were skeptical of students’ eligibility to complete advanced and honors-level courses because, despite high state test scores, their grades in previous classes were low. But just over half of counselors who responded to the survey said the messages changed their perspective about the academic capabilities of at least one student.
“This particular student […], I would’ve never thought he would make scores to even be presented that opportunity. That’s like, ‘Oh, wait a minute, maybe I [need to] look at something here,’” one counselor told researchers. “We need to talk to him about reinforcing that he does have abilities that he may be questioning himself. For sure, it did that.”
