This work already provides a roster of mechanisms to apply in education, but we might also consider how to capture and describe mechanisms that are more specific to contexts of teaching and learning.
One education-relevant example is changing financial aid processes when students apply to college: streamlining the design of forms and including financial aid information when parents complete taxes can significantly increase the proportion of students who not only apply for financial aid, but go on to enroll in college. The work of the UK behavioral insights team, starting with the 2010 publication MINDSPACE, is an excellent example of how psychological science can be translated into useable principles that are then tested in a variety of experiments and finally deployed in policymaking. federal government is just one of many to have signed up to the “nudge’” theory of public policy: by working with general psychological principles such as priming and network effects, they can refine the way policies make use of social norms, environmental features, or even word choices. With the morphing of behavioral psychology into behavioral economics, some of these mechanisms have even become principles for designing policies. Some of these, such as priming, framing, regression or avoidance, have become relatively common parlance. The field of psychology, for example, has established methods of identifying discrete “behavioral mechanisms": terms that describe how certain actions of features of the environment can change how we behave. It is the key part of an explanation for how one thing causes another. What is a mechanism? At the most basic level, a mechanism is a link between an action and an outcome. We might like the metaphor, but it prompts the question of what makes a good LEGO piece. And the more we have, the more we can build. We might not be able to do much with just a few “LEGOs,” but at least each one is rock solid and versatile. If What Works focused on mechanisms rather than programs-taking a lead from international development over medicine in the way we design RCTs-we could start to identify the human and social learning factors which are relevant across contexts, homing in on the most essential pieces that need to be in place to create powerful learning. In the traditional view of What Works, to implement a program with fidelity a teacher has to slot into a role specified by the design, just as in a Polly Pocket we can only move Polly to stand in a few pre-ordained spots.
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