  The impacts of COVID-19 reach far beyond the hundreds of lives lost to the
disease; in particular, the pre-existing learning crisis is expected to be
magnified during school shutdown. Despite efforts to put distance learning
strategies in place, the threat of student dropouts, especially among
adolescents, looms as a major concern. Are interventions to motivate
adolescents to stay in school effective amidst the pandemic? Here we show that,
in Brazil, nudges via text messages to high-school students, to motivate them
to stay engaged with school activities, substantially reduced dropouts during
school shutdown, and greatly increased their motivation to go back to school
when classes resume. While such nudges had been shown to decrease dropouts
during normal times, it is surprising that those impacts replicate in the
absence of regular classes because their effects are typically mediated by
teachers (whose effort in the classroom changes in response to the nudges).
Results show that insights from the science of adolescent psychology can be
leveraged to shift developmental trajectories at a critical juncture. They also
qualify those insights: effects increase with exposure and gradually fade out
once communication stops, providing novel evidence that motivational
interventions work by redirecting adolescents' attention.
