Behavioral Insights for Public Policy: Concepts and Cases

Ruggeri, K., Hlavova, R., Andersen, T. L., Evans, H., Mareva, S., & Robinson, C. D. (2019). Education. In K. Ruggeri (Ed.), Behavioral Insights for Public Policy: Concepts and Cases (pp. 131-155). New York, NY: Routledge.

Education is a critical resource for sustaining economic development and social cohesion, as well as individual and population health. Policies aimed at improving education could have a positive impact far beyond classrooms, particularly given that higher levels of education are associated with greater well-being. In this chapter, we present some of the current challenges in the field and review a number of behavioral insights that offer the means to address them. We explore interventions that could alleviate the corrosive effects of inequality and ensure smoother transitions across different educational stages. We focus on various approaches for improving educational practice such as providing incentives and fostering motivation, which have been selected specifically to highlight recent findings in vital topics for education policy.