Milkman: High schoolers who gave peer study advice improved their own grades
Katy Milkman · Katy Milkman – How to Change (Capital Allocators, EP.199) · Jun 14, 2021 · at 27:18
Wharton professor Katy Milkman describes a field experiment on self-efficacy and advice giving conducted with Lauren Eskreis-Winkler.
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“My favorite one was a study with high school students, about 2000 of them, where we randomly assigned half of the students to Give advice to their peers at the beginning of the second semester on how to be more effective in their study strategies. So we said, we want you to give some coaching to younger peers who are below you in school. How do you think they can study more effectively? And they spent about 10 minutes answering questionnaires to give advice. And then we had a control group that didn't go through this exercise. And we looked at the students' grades at the end of the third quarter, and we found that the students had significantly improved their grades who had been prompted to give advice. In two areas, math, which was one of the areas we originally said we'd look at, and also in the class they told us they most wanted to improve in. And we didn't turn C students into valedictorians, but what we'd done was move them up about one point on a 50 to a hundred scale, and it was significant, with 10 minutes of just asking them to be a mentor or a coach.”
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