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Abstract
The author of this study offers new evidence on the effectiveness of chatbots as an instructional mode via a randomized controlled experiment in which college seniors were given online training on the convenience of pursuing a master’s degree and the suitability of taking out a graduate student loan. Two educational formats, a YouTube video and a Facebook chatbot, were used for delivering that training to the experimental subjects. Economic education improved the economic knowledge needed to calculate a master’s degree’s viability. The effectiveness of financial education in improving student loan debt literacy was also verified. The effectiveness of the chatbot-based learning was greater than that of the video format for providing economic education. Only the chatbot delivery method was effective in providing financial education.
Acknowledgments
The author offers many thanks for three anonymous reviewers’ valuable contributions and comments to the revision of this article and also thanks the journal editors for their helpful comments.
Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1. FUNCAS is an acronym that stands for Fundación de las Cajas de Ahorros. It was the institution that financed the project, hence the name.
2. In Spain, there are no public loans to pursue an undergraduate or graduate university degree, although some financial institutions offer student loans.
3. By gender, 53.1% were women, and 46.9% were men.
4. “Randomly allocated groups do not need to be the same size for true baseline comparability. If the characteristics of the participants are comparable, any differences in group sizes do not bias the result” (Elkins Citation2015, 229).
5. In the remainder of the article, when we speak of “all participants,” we mean the total number of college students who participated in the experiment, including the control group. When speaking of “experimental subjects,” we include only the individuals in the two treatment groups.
6. In relation to experimental choice, and why the research team chose an across-subject design instead of a within-subject design, we would like to highlight that the experiment was costly, in both time and money, to implement. In order to ensure that the experiment session did not last too long, it was decided to randomize the students simultaneously into two treatment groups and a control group that would serve to compare the results. In future studies, that aspect will be taken into account (i.e., instead of having a separate control group, the knowledge questions could be asked before and after the intervention). The extension of the experiment to another profile of university students is also expected.
7. The sum of tuition and forgone income would actually be the total opportunity costs of graduate education.
8. It was explained to the students that salaries have to be multiplied by the probability of finding a job in each of the two scenarios.
9. The direct cost of tuition fees (€14,000) does not need to be discounted because they are disbursed at time 0. The opportunity cost (€18,700) is discounted one year to the present time.
10. The name of the financial institution was fictitiously used for instructional purposes only.
11. The 3-question test was based on the content of the economic training. It is available upon request.
12. This test is available upon request.
13. The FUNCAS project team sought to assess whether student loan borrowers understand loan terms and can estimate what their loan payments will be after graduating from graduate school. Therefore, the three financial literacy questions about inflation, interest in a savings account, and risk diversification in investments that have been widely used to measure financial literacy (Lusardi and Mitchell Citation2011) were not suitable for the experiment. Anderson, Conzelmann, and Lacy (Citation2018), using financial aid data on America’s college students (NPSAS:16), already suggested that “student loan literacy is a distinct construct from [general] financial literacy” (21).
14. The total cost was €30,000: direct costs (master’s degree tuition, books, etc.) plus living costs while in graduate school.
15. They are available upon request.
16. In the control group, at the beginning of the experiment, since this group did not receive any treatment.
17. These results are available upon request.
18. “Indirect effects are always part of mediation, but they are not synonymous. […] In general, use of the term mediation should be reserved for designs that feature time precedence; otherwise, use of the term indirect effect is more realistic.” (Kline Citation2016, 134–35).
19. These outcomes were measured in that order after the intervention. Four separate scales (7-point Likert scale items) were employed in the experiment. They are available upon request.
20. In the estimation, we also control for gender, majors, and academic ability.
21. In truth, in the experiment, only with the chatbot treatment.
22. In the latter case, only the training delivered through the chatbot.