College success requires students to engage with their institution academically and administratively. Missteps with administrative processes can threaten student persistence and success. Through two experimental studies, one exploratory (N=13,657) and one pre-registered and confirmatory (N=11,561), the authors of this study assessed the effectiveness of an artificially intelligent, text-based chatbot that proactively reached out to students to support navigation of administrative processes and use of campus resources.
Across two-year and four-year college contexts, outreach was most effective when focused on discrete administrative processes–such as filing financial aid forms and managing registration holds–which were acute and time-sensitive and for which outreach could be targeted to those for whom it was relevant.
The authors hypothesize that proactive outreach will be most effective when: (1) framed as from a trusted source with whom students would expect to communicate; (2) targeted using data to ensure that communication is relevant to students’ personal circumstances; and (3) focused on well-defined, required, and often acute tasks.
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