What I sometimes call the “great Millian hope” is that freedom, knowledge, and happiness are positively correlated. A new study conducted by a philosopher and a psychologist provide some reasons to think that, in the college classroom at least, the hope can be realized.

[“Ulysses and the Sirens” by John William Waterhouse]

–

In “Choosing to learn: The importance of student autonomy in higher education“, published yesterday at Science Advances, Simon Cullen and Daniel Oppenheimer (both at Carnegie Mellon University) report on a pair of studies they conducted about college student autonomy. In one, the students were given the choice of whether to have their particular class attendance mandatory and factored into their overall course grade. In the other, they gave students the option to opt out of some more challenging work.

From the abstract of their paper:

We demonstrate how two autonomy-supportive policies effectively increase classroom attendance and subject mastery. First, in a randomized controlled field study, we explored the effect of allowing students to choose whether to make their attendance mandatory (i.e., a component of their course grades). We found that nearly all students used the opportunity as a pre-commitment device and were subsequently more likely to attend class than were students whose attendance had been mandated. Second, in a multi-year cohort study, we explored the effect of allowing students to opt out of a challenging, high-effort assessment stream, finding that students given greater autonomy invested more effort into their assignments and attained greater proficiency with the material. 

And from the paper itself:

Allowing students to commit to mandatory attendance and to choose more rigorous assignments led them to attend class more reliably, to put more effort into their assignments, and to understand the material better.

Further, most students who chose mandatory attendance were happy with their choice (10% were not).

You should check out the full paper for details on their studies and findings.

Cullen and Oppenheimer think that the benefits of student autonomy probably apply beyond the domains in which they tested it. They write:

While we have focused on attendance and assessment, similar choice architectures can be applied to many other course elements. For any mandatory course element, it is worth considering whether making it optional-mandatory might serve students better.

They acknowledge that faculty may be reluctant to give students more freedom:

Faulty intuitions about the drivers of human motivation might also make faculty reluctant to grant students greater autonomy. For example, although people believe that they are more likely to persist in challenging behaviors such as dieting and exercise when they focus on long-term benefits, research suggests that attending to immediate rewards leads to greater persistence. Faculty might similarly turn to autonomy-undermining extrinsic motivators if they forget that learning should be inherently fun and rewarding. Moreover, research on preferences for paternalistic policies in educational contexts reveals that a meaningful fraction of people believe it is a professor’s job to protect students from making poor decisions in and even outside of the classroom. Thus, paternalistic attitudes could lead faculty to believe that they must make wise decisions on students’ behalf.

Of course, another possibility is that faculty want to give students more autonomy but lack tools for doing so.

To help on that last point, they offer some other examples of opportunities for increasing student choice:

The full paper is here.

Discussion welcome, especially descriptions of how your own attempts to increase student autonomy have gone.