By Diana Toledo Figueroa
Analyst, OECD Directorate for Education and Skills
– Many factors affect our decision making – a new OECD paper looks at some of the biases that influence students’ decisions.
– The paper looks at the relationship between students’ decisions and their sense of belonging, numeracy and literacy levels, and level of disadvantage.
– COVID has highlighted the need to strengthen student resilience, and boosting their capacity to make better decisions is one way to do this.
Every day, from the moment we wake up until we go to sleep, we make hundreds of decisions. What we should do, where we should go, what we should prioritise. Do we always make the best decisions? Most likely not. Research shows that aspects, such as our capacity to decide, our perception of value, or our relationship with others, often channel into conscious or unconscious biases when making decisions. Moreover, situations of change and disruption can exacerbate these biases, further affecting our capacity to decide.
How can policy makers then help students to make better decisions in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, natural disasters, economic crises, or other types of change? The good news is governments can indeed empower students to make better life-changing decisions today. Through the support of the Thomas J. Alexander Fellowship, and as part of the work of the Education Policy Outlook on responsiveness and resilience in education policy, a newly released OECD working paper analyses this topic to explore possible actions.
Taking a deep dive into literature and data provided by internationally comparable datasets such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the paper Behavioural Economics and the COVID-Induced Education Crisis, by Professor Nicholas Biddle (Australian National University), discusses some of the biases that influence decision making in students. While causality should not be inferred from these data, this analysis provides highly policy-relevant considerations for governments today and for the years to come.
Here are three key findings:
1. Students’ sense of belonging in school can relate to how they envisage their future
Students who report a stronger sense of school belonging in PISA are also more likely to see value in education and hold higher education aspirations. At the same time, school belonging strongly correlates with school resources. In times of disruption and lockdown, ensuring sufficient resources that allow developing a sense of community at school level could therefore help students develop broader and more far-reaching future education pathways.
Ensuring sufficient resources that allow developing a sense of community at school could help students develop broader and more far-reaching future education pathways
2. Numeracy and literacy levels do appear to matter for students’ career aspirations
Analysis shows that students with higher literacy and numeracy levels also tend to have higher expectations. The COVID-19 pandemic, however, has hindered students’ cognitive development, potentially resulting as well in more pessimistic career aspirations. Students’ unexploited potential in the years to come is a loss for societies and economies.
Students with higher literacy and numeracy levels also tend to have higher career expectations
To prevent this, governments could help students today by providing them with more support and guidance in aspects related to occupational expectations. The aim should be to help students to bridge the gap between their exacerbated learning challenges today and their hopes for the future.
3. Students make different decisions in the face of risk, which can affect their futures disproportionately
In a context of economic distress, students from more disadvantaged backgrounds may take very different decisions that could disproportionately affect their future careers, compared to those of their peers from more advantaged backgrounds. The most disadvantaged students are more prone to taking decisions in the present that are more risk averse, less altruistic and more biased; which at the same time, may lead to a future with less favourable labour market outcomes.
The most disadvantaged students are more prone to taking decisions in the present that are more risk averse
This paper makes a call for evidence-informed interventions that help students refocus on their future, while gaining insight on present biases, which may hinder their capacity for decision making.
A key point that this paper makes is that individuals are not necessarily rational or irrational. We make decisions, right or wrong, and continue to make new ones based on the outcomes of previous decisions. As countries strive to navigate away from the pandemic and other types of change, strengthening students’ capacity to make better decisions will be key to making them more resilient as global and personal contexts evolve.
- Paper | Behavioural economics and the COVID-induced education crisis
- A Policy Maker’s Handbook for More Resilient Systems
- Initial education policy responses to COVID-19: Country snapshots
- Blog | Acting on lessons from COVID to bring about deeper change in education
- Blog | Investing in career guidance: Helping youth out of the COVID pandemic
- Blog | Six key takeaways on equity from Education at a Glance 2021
- Lessons for education during the coronavirus crisis
- The OECD coronavirus (COVID-19) policy hub
Photo: Shutterstock/Iakov Filimonov