What to Expect When You're Diagnosing

The first step is determining what you want to achieve. What challenges are you trying to tackle? What is the gap you are trying to fill? For example, you may have noticed high attrition rates. Or, perhaps, the teachers in your university report that students seem unmotivated and disengaged. Maybe you’ve recently noticed that more and more students are “falling through the cracks” in the system. A solid understanding of the “problem,” “challenge,” or “gap” helps you inform all other steps of your diagnosis.

When thinking about the “challenge,” it is often common to find that each stakeholder within the organization has a slightly different perspective.​​​​ For instance, while a teacher might feel that the school resources and materials available to students may need updating, administrators may be more focused on budget constraints and resource allocation. 

So, how do you go about determining a single challenge to tackle that everyone can get behind? Methods like interviews, brainstorming sessions, or even alignment sessions are common at this stage. Perhaps holding a brainstorming session with teachers to understand how and why they believe resources need to be updated may prove useful. Or it may be more helpful to interview school administrators from different departments, including those in charge of budget, student resources, and student well-being, among others to get a variety of perspectives on the topic. These methods can help you navigate through the many different opinions that internal stakeholders might have in order to find common ground. 

Next, you may be tempted to run interviews and a survey with your students to gather information about them. Great idea… but stop! This is where things get tricky! Before jumping into things, don’t forget to incorporate behavioral science principles into the interview and survey design! Lest you run the risk of having one more dataset that you have to try to leverage but have a hard time doing since it is not designed through this perspective!

For a solid, evidence-based behavioral diagnosis, after you have identified the challenge, it is important to engage with scientific articles or reports, and perhaps even some international NGO websites, that already address the topic. Understanding what research in fields like psychology, decision-making, neuroscience, and education have to say about the issue can guide your decision on the core topics and areas the rest of your process will focus on. 

Looking at the literature from a behavioral perspective will help you sift through the gazillion results you may get when searching Google Scholar for articles that may be of interest to you (a quick, fairly specific Google Scholar search for student succes+attrition+universtiy limited to resources published after 2020 renders a whopping 17,000 results!). This “filter” will help you hone into areas to target in a feasible and manageable way through interventions. In fact, you may even use this stage to start developing some initial hypotheses that you can further dig into during the next stages!

After delving into the literature, ideally, you would engage your students using a series of methods that will provide you with mixed (qualitative and quantitative) data about the problem. Interviews and focus groups, for example, may be a great way to obtain some deep qualitative insights about the topics you have decided to focus on. Meanwhile, for a broader look at student emotions, beliefs, and behaviors as they relate to the challenge you are tackling, you may decide to run a large-scale quantitative survey across your university. 

In both cases, the instruments you use should be designed using a behavioral perspective that tries to elicit responses not only about what the students’ behavior is, but also how and why it is occurring. The questions you would ask here, not only in interviews but also in surveys, should be planned through considering particular behavioral hypotheses. For example, you may want to ask about barriers that individuals face when trying to engage with an intervention that you already use. Alternatively, you may be looking to understand more about why students engage in particular behaviors or what they think about a specific aspect of their educational experience.

While you may start off by gathering qualitative data and use it to help inform and give shape to your quantitative instrument, or start with quantitative data gathering to then use the qualitative data to dig deeper into some of the patterns, the important thing about this stage is better understanding the students themselves: their perspectives, behaviors, motivations, barriers, drivers, and other behavioral insights. Unfortunately, just finding out more information about their attendance rates, gender, age, or other demographic data won’t cut it!

Finally, you should analyze all of your new data using a behavioral lens. In this step, you would consider the behavioral and cognitive patterns that may influence student well-being, academic performance, and achievement, among other things. You should usually seek to identify the connection between the what, the how, the when, the who, and, most importantly, the why of student behavior. Hypothetically, you might expect to see the following:

• What: Are my students performing as expected? No, my students are underperforming academically.
• How: How are students approaching challenges in the classroom? They are approaching them as obstacles, rather than growth opportunities. 
• When: When are students challenged most in the classroom? During midterms and finals!
• Who: Who is impacted the most by these challenges? Students who receive financial aid. 
• Why: Why are students approaching challenges this way? They come from a sociocultural context that has taught them to fear failure and, consequently, they fear challenges that may lead to failure!

“Ok, great, so now I have a lot of data, and I analyzed it using a behavioral lens. What now? I want to know what I can do with it!”

This, my friends, is the stage where the art and science of behavioral science translation comes into play.

Data analytics is all fine and dandy, but if you cannot translate this into actionable interventions, what is the use? Just as in medicine, we would hope our doctor does not give us a diagnosis and leaves us “hanging” (“You have strep throat. See ya!”), when it comes to a behavioral diagnosis, we want to know what we can do about it. 

In education, a behavioral diagnosis helps you understand the what, how, when, who, and why of students’ behaviors. Translation, on the other hand, helps you move from insights about students to effective interventions to improve student outcomes. 

How does this translation process work? Unfortunately, I'm going to leave you hanging on that one... until next time!