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 matched what employees said to what their 401(k) records showed. In a survey at one firm, 68 in every 100 respondents said their savings rate was too low, 24 of those 68 planned to raise their contribution in the next few months, and 3 of those 24, 14 percent, actually did in the four months after the survey. At another firm that ran one-hour financial education seminars, virtually every attendee not yet in the plan said they planned to enroll, and by 30 June 2000 only 14 percent had joined, against 7 percent of non-attendees who joined anyway; of attendees already in the plan, 28 percent planned to raise their contribution rate and 8 percent did. The authors concluded that financial education does not appear to be a powerful mechanism for encouraging 401(k) saving, while automatic enrollment dramatically raised participation and most employees kept whatever default contribution rate and investment it set.
- The decision point
- The seminar worked, by every measure a seminar reports. Attendees understood, agreed, and said they would act. Of the attendees not yet in the plan, nearly all said they would enroll, and eighty-six in a hundred had not by the end of June. 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 design that moved behavior in that research put the decision in the moment by default: automatic enrollment. 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
Two different 14 percents appear in the paper. One is from a survey at one firm: of respondents who said they saved too little and planned to raise their contribution, 14 percent (3 of 24 per 100 respondents) did within four months. The other is from seminars at a second firm: 14 percent of attendees not yet in the plan had joined by 30 June 2000, though nearly all had said they would. The seminar data were aggregated, so the authors could not track follow-through person by person, and some joiners would have enrolled anyway (7 percent of non-attendees did). Both are observational, and the authors call the survey data hard to interpret; their stronger 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.