In an intervention with nearly 2,000 high schoolers, a team led by Wharton postdoctoral researcher, Lauren Eskreis-Winkler (now a postdoc at University of Chicago) discovered that advice-giving helps the students doing the counseling. Half of the students were randomized to be advice givers; half to a control condition. Dr. Eskreis-Winkler’s team told the advice givers they thought they have valuable knowledge and information about how to motivate themselves in school and asked them to share that knowledge with younger students.

The paper represents the first major project from Penn’s Behavior Change for Good (BCFG) initiative. It was co-authored by BCFG co-directors and Penn professors Katherine Milkman, the Evan C Thompson Endowed Term Chair for Excellence in Teaching and Wharton professor of operations, information and decisions, and Angela Duckworth, the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Psychology in SAS, BCFG co-lead and head of the nonprofit Character Lab, and BCFG executive director Dena Gromet.

“Motivation is not calculus. If you told students who don’t know calculus, ‘Teach this to somebody else,’ that would be ludicrous,” Dr. Eskreis-Winkler explained. “Motivation is a little different. Often, people know what they need to do to achieve a goal. They’re just not doing it.”

The advice givers answered a series of questions about topics like the best place to study and how to avoid procrastination. They also wrote a letter of advice to a younger student. The advice was distributed to students, but the advice givers did not directly interact with the students. At the end of the academic quarter that included the intervention, advice-givers earned higher report-card grades than controls. According to Dr. Eskreis-Winkler, “Raising objectively measured academic achievement is a tall order, so we were pretty thrilled that the intervention managed to help kids in this way, over an extended time period.

“The intervention, on average, raised grades for all students. Often, school-based interventions are only beneficial for certain subgroups, for example, students of one gender, race or socioeconomic status. In contrast, this intervention benefitted everyone.” The work could have implications for the way teachers, coaches and parents approach motivation.

For the complete story, visit https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/advice-giving-benefits-person-sharing-guidance