Curriculum·G702 Pedagogical Fundamentals·about 32 min
Transfer: from a passed quiz to a changed decision
By the end of this lesson you can
- →State what the 401(k) seminar study found about the gap between intention and action, with the figure
- →Explain why a passed assessment and a stated intention are both upstream of the decision, and what sits between them and it
- →Compute the follow-through rate a course would need to move a cohort's behavior by a stated amount, given the measured gap
- →Design the step that closes the gap: a decision moved to the moment of learning, with the action taken inside the course rather than promised for later
Graduate · enrolled learners
This lesson opens with Defined Contribution Pensions: Plan Rules, Participant Choices, and the Path of Least Resistance, 2002.
- What happened
- James Choi, David Laibson, Brigitte Madrian and Andrew Metrick studied employees at a large firm who attended financial education seminars about their 401(k) retirement plan. Surveyed after the seminar, many attendees said their savings rate was too low and that they planned to raise their contribution rate in the next few months. Of those who reported saving too little and said they planned to increase their contribution, 14 percent actually did so in the following months. The rest kept the rate they had. The same research program found that the plan's default settings, what happened if an employee did nothing, determined participation and contribution rates far more than anything the employees learned or intended.
- The decision point
- The seminar worked, by every measure a seminar reports. Attendees understood, agreed, and said they would act. Eighty-six in a hundred of those who said so did not. The gap was not knowledge and it was not intention; it was the distance between the room where the decision was understood and the moment, weeks later and alone, when the form had to be filled in. The default did the deciding because the default was already in the moment and the learner was not. A course that ends with the learner intending to do something has ended eighty-six percent short. The only design that closed the gap in that research was moving the action to the moment: the default, the enrollment on the spot. This Academy's labs are the same move applied to teaching, and this lesson is about making it.
What you will be able to answer
- →What did the 401(k) seminar study find?
- →Where does the transfer gap sit?
- →What closes the gap?
- →What is the Callout in every lesson for?
Orientation and Year One are open: anyone can read them without an account. From Year Two onward the lessons are for enrolled learners, because progress through the later years only means anything if it is tracked against a record.
It is free. We do not sell the list and there is nothing to buy at the end of it.
Sources and review
- https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w8655/w8655.pdf
- https://www.nber.org/papers/w8651
- https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2003/11/changing-behavior-easier-than-we-thought
Confidence high·Volatility low·Reviewed 2026-09-14·Owner unassigned
Contested
The 14 percent figure is from the seminar attendees who both reported saving too little and stated a plan to increase contributions; follow-through among all attendees was different and not the relevant quantity. The study is observational, at one firm, and the authors' stronger causal evidence concerns defaults rather than seminars.
Moving an action into the lesson raises the follow-through inside the course and says nothing about the next such decision, months later, which is where G702-01's spacing and the cards take over. The two mechanisms are complements, not substitutes.