Can Nudging Mentors Weaken Student Support? Experimental Evidence from a Virtual Communication Intervention

Abstract

This paper presents results from an experimental evaluation of an intervention designed to enhance virtual student support. During the 2019–2020 school year, randomly selected mentors in a school-based mentoring program received monthly reminders with tips for communicating with youth via text, email, and phone. Unexpectedly, the results showed that although the nudges did not impact the frequency of mentor outreach (student-reported), they reduced the rate at which students reached out (mentor-reported) and saw themselves as responsive to their mentors. Moreover, and possibly as a consequence, mentors who received the intervention felt less connected to students and less satisfied with their mentoring relationships, and treated students gained less than comparison students from the mentoring program as a whole in terms of their personal and attitudinal growth. The findings add important nuance to the evidence on how behavioral interventions in educational contexts operate. Although past studies find that nudges can support engagement in discrete tasks, these findings suggest that prescribing relational practices may be less effective. Thus, mentor supports must be carefully designed in order to yield the intended benefits for students.

Keywords:

• Mentoring
• virtual student support
• behavioral intervention
• randomized experiment

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Robin Jacob, Matt Ronfeldt, Brian Jacob, Awilda Rodriguez, Lindsay Page, and Susanna Loeb for their valuable input on earlier drafts of this manuscript. I am also grateful for feedback from participants of the 2021 Association for Educational Finance and Policy (AEFP) annual conference and the Causal Inference in Education Research Seminar (CIERS) at the University of Michigan. Madeline Trumbauer provided excellent research assistance.

Notes

1 MRQ items were normally distributed with means, standard deviations (SD), and measures of skewness as follows: relational quality (mean = 2.86, SD = 0.68, skewness = −0.48); instrumental quality (mean = 2.66, SD = 0.72, skewness = −0.21); closeness (mean = 4.37, SD = 0.90, skewness = −0.31); and satisfaction (mean = 3.97, SD = 1.07, skewness = 0.18).

2 The focus groups were part of a concurrent, qualitative report on the WF program as a whole, and so participants’ treatment statuses in the mentor nudge experiment were unknown.

Additional information

Funding

I received support from the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education [PR/Award # R305B1170015] to complete this work as part of a predoctoral training fellowship. Additional support was provided by the Rackham Graduate School at the University of Michigan.