Currently reading Cortinhas (2025) on “Does nudging higher education students improve attendance and does it matter?”

Samuelsson et al. (2025) recently investigated students’ reasons for absence, and it turns out that at least our first-year students at LTH are very strategic about attendance vs learning in other ways elsewhere. But even though students have proven that they can learn well on their own, for social reasons it is still nice for teachers and other students to be in an environment where most people show up most of the time. So I was curious to read the answer to Cortinhas (2025)’s question “Does nudging higher education students improve attendance and does it matter?”

And it turns out that nudging, by emailing students that have missed a tutorial, does improve student attendance in their study, even significantly, relative to a control group that didn’t receive emails. This effect wears off a bit over time. And it also turns out that it does matter, since higher tutorial attendance is associated with higher final grades. Importantly, the connection between attendance and grades is only about tutorials, not lectures, where there are potentially other catch-up opportunities, like recordings or shared slides and scripts etc.. So far so good for this study.

Reading this, I wonder if part of the effect is not just the reminder to show up, but more about the fact that someone noticed their absence and seemed to care*? But then of course that illusion of caring (or, you know, the actual caring) needs to also be kept up when students do show up, so that later messages can still have the same effect… But it seems to be an easy enough intervention, as long as it is used, you know, carefully and full of care, and not overused…

*seeming to care about an intervention group but not about a control group (if students are aware that some of them receive emails while others don’t) is also a potential problem with the study that Cortinhas (2025) acknowledges. That could of course backfire…

Today: Light and shadow on the bottom of the pool. Can you spot the shadow of the floating lane-divider line, and the waves that are radiating from its movement?

Cortinhas, C. (2025). Does nudging higher education students improve attendance and does it matter? A quasi-natural experiment. International Review of Economics Education, 49, 100317.