Students enrolled in online courses drop out at dramatically higher rates than conventional learning contexts. Research in psychology points to factors related to students' sense of self-integrity and identification with academics. This session presents results from a psychological intervention designed to reduce attrition rates and improve performance in online courses.
Daily life brings with it numerous opportunities for failure, which can challenge one’s sense of self-integrity. Such threatening events weigh heavily on a person because they constrict attention and thought to focus on the source of the threat (Mogg, Holmes, Garner, & Bradley, 2008).
Research on social identity and performance has revealed that experiences of threat or stress restrict people’s ability to use their cognitive and environmental resources to perform and grow. For example, people who worry that they may be seen in the light of a negative stereotype—a phenomenon known as “stereotype threat”—experience stress and uncertainty about their social belonging that can undermine their performance. These experiences of psychological threat act as invisible barriers that prevent students from acting in their own best interests. If you’re worried that you aren’t smart enough or that there's no real point in persisting at something that is hard and doesn't have a high likelihood of success, then you are also less likely to commit to your learning aspirations, you become more hesitant to reach out to your professor, and you might have a harder time bouncing back from a challenge or setback (e.g., a bad grade). All of these invisible outcomes of perceived psychological threat would inhibit your ability to perform and grow.
This is especially the case when a person has to contend not only with the challenges of their academic experience but also from other domains, such as work and relationships. As such, students enrolled in online courses are at a higher risk of wanting to disengage from their academics--often the only path towards a better future--because of the added stressors that work to corrode their sense of academic self-integrity.
Fortunately, research in psychology has revealed an intervention that can buffer a person's sense of self-integrity, and consequently allow them to stay engaged with potentially difficult or threatening domains, such as academics. Values affirmation interventions provide the opportunity to reflect on values of importance from a broader range of non-threatening domains, and have been shown to have beneficial effects for a wide range of important outcomes (Cohen & Sherman, 2014; Sherman & Cohen, 2006). Values-affirmation interventions have been found to reduce restraining forces that inhibit performance. Typically consisting of a short self-reflection task that instructs participants to reflect on core values, value-affirmations have been shown to have meaningful and long-lasting benefits in a variety of domains, including stress reduction, academic achievement, and health outcomes such as lowering body mass index and smoking cessation. When applied in educational contexts, values-affirmations have been shown to repeatedly reduce the achievement gaps among minority students.
In our study, we developed and implemented a values affirmation intervention among a sample of 40,000 students enrolled in a series of online courses as part of their orientation to the learning platform. We found that, when applied in 5 Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), participants demonstrated greater goal commitment for completing their course, and better long-term performance. Implications for values affirmation interventions are discussed.
Implications for the potential of such tailored and theoretically informed interventions in the context of online learning courses are discussed.