Does nudging higher education students improve attendance and does it matter? A quasi-natural experiment

The effects of student absenteeism on educational outcomes are well documented, with most studies showing a significant, negative effect on student performance. In recent years, a growing number of institutions have been using a variety of nudge interventions to help combat absenteeism, improve student performance, and reduce dropout rates. Although many studies report the success of many of these initiatives in terms of student performance and retention, others alert that nudging can also have significant negative effects on students. This paper examines the effectiveness of nudging undergraduate students to improve attendance and student performance in tutorial sessions. We conducted a quasi-natural experiment with more than 400 year two UK university students, randomly assigning them to either a treatment group receiving personalized email reminders after missing tutorials, or a control group without any nudging intervention. Our results show a large and significant positive effect of the nudging intervention on attendance rates. Furthermore, using a two-stage least squares estimation method, we established that improved tutorial attendance leads to better performance. Our findings advance the debate on the efficacy of nudges in higher education and offer some important insights for addressing student absenteeism at the university level.