A new paper from Carnegie Mellon University indicates that giving students more autonomy leads to better attendance and improved performance. The research was published in the journal Science Advances.

In one experiment, students were given the choice to make their own attendance mandatory. Contradicting common faculty beliefs, 90% of students in the initial study chose to do so, committing themselves to attending class reliably or to having their final grades docked. Under this “optional-mandatory attendance” policy, students came to class more reliably than students whose attendance had been mandated.

Student choice in learning

The pattern has held true. In additional studies across five classes that included 60–200 students, 73%–95% opted for mandatory attendance, and at most 10% regretted their decision by the semester’s end.

“Like Ulysses, students know they will face significant temptations. By making their attendance mandatory, they exercise self-control over their future behavior,” said first author Simon Cullen, assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and Dietrich College AI and Education Fellow.

“We are born curious, and we naturally enjoy mastering many challenging learning tasks, but controlling course policies like mandatory attendance can undermine that motivation.”

The role of autonomy in academic success

According to Cullen, the findings challenge widely held beliefs about student behavior. He continues that many educators worry that given the choice, students would opt for the easiest path possible. However, this study paints a starkly different picture.

“Anytime in a class that you give freedom to choose, you give students the feeling of control over their education,” said Danny Oppenheimer, professor in the Social and Decision Sciences and Psychology departments at CMU and co-author of the article. “It puts the learning in the students’ hands and increases their motivation.”

Preparing students for real-world challenges

A second experiment indicated that when given the option to switch to an easier homework stream at any time before midterms, 85%–90% of students chose to tackle the more challenging work. The “optional-mandatory homework” policy led students to spend more time on their assignments and to learn more over the semester compared to students who were compelled to complete the same work. Cullen gauged the improved understanding of the material by examining how well students did on the problem sets throughout the semester.

These findings suggest that the common practice of imposing strict rules on college students may be counterproductive. Cullen and Oppenheimer found that allowing students more autonomy could lead to better academic outcomes and prepare them more effectively for the real world.

“The thought was that giving them greater control over their own learning would prepare them for the real world,” Cullen said. “Students can be driven to excel in our classes by the same sources of motivation that drive them to pursue countless projects and passions that require no external incentives. But only if we let them choose to learn.”

Enhancing Engagement and Retention in Higher Education

The researchers note their findings also highlight a significant gap in current educational practices. Despite decades of research demonstrating the importance of autonomy to motivation, autonomy-promoting policies remain rare in higher education.

“It’s as if we’ve been ignoring one of the most powerful tools in our educational toolkit,” said Oppenheimer. “By harnessing students’ intrinsic motivation to learn through increased autonomy, we achieve better results than through external pressure.”

The researchers caution that their findings, while promising, have limitations. The study was conducted at a single university with a limited number of students, and more research is needed to determine if the results will replicate across different types of institutions and student populations. The authors are collaborating with a diverse set of institutions to test its broader applicability.

“We’re super excited about these results, but we’re also eager to see how our interventions work across a range of settings,” Cullen said. “We’re particularly interested in exploring how autonomy might benefit students from disadvantaged backgrounds and those with disabilities.”

The study opens up new avenues for research and practical applications in higher education. The authors suggest that similar choice architectures could be applied to other aspects of college courses, such as deadlines, course materials and even exam formats.

“As colleges and universities grapple with issues of student engagement, retention and academic success, this research offers a fresh perspective,” said Cullen. “By trusting students with more control over their education, institutions might not only improve academic outcomes but also foster a more positive and empowering learning environment.”

Scientists have determined that a rare element found in some of the oldest solids in the solar system, such as meteorites, and previously thought to have been forged in supernova explosions, actually predate such cosmic events, challenging long-held theories about its origin.

Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory led studies of the radioactive isotope beryllium-10, which existed when the solar system came into being some 4.5 to 5 billion years ago. They probed whether this isotope can be formed in sufficient quantities during the massive explosions of gigantic stars in their death throes, called supernovae.

“It is unlikely that such a stellar explosion is the main source for this isotope, as it is observed in the early solar system,” said Raphael Hix, an ORNL nuclear astrophysicist who participated in the study published in the journal Physical Review C. The findings “help us to understand the history of the solar system and the galaxy as a whole.”

The scientists speculate that beryllium-10 is more likely the result of what’s known as cosmic ray spallation—an interaction with the random and ubiquitous high-energy protons and other isotopes, such as carbon-12, that race in all directions throughout the universe at almost the speed of light.

When a star dies, it ejects atoms from its core into the interstellar medium, which is low-density matter that fills the space between stars in a galaxy. The process of making isotopes and elements in stars is referred to as nucleosynthesis. Eventually, portions of the interstellar medium will collect to form the next generation of stars and their associated planets. Included in that atomic soup is carbon-12, which occasionally collides with cosmic rays.

When these high-energy rays collide with carbon-12 atoms, “it literally breaks the nucleus apart, and what’s left can include beryllium-10,” Hix said.

About 4.5 billion years ago, the solar system formed from the collapse of a humongous cloud of gaseous molecules, which created a swirling disk of material known as the solar nebula. Over millions of years, gravity caused the material to coalesce, leading to the formation of the sun and all its planets.

Beryllium-10 has a relatively short half-life—the time taken for half the number of radioactive nuclei to decay—of 1.4 million years. That means any beryllium-10 found on Earth today was created long after the solar system formed.

However, in some meteorites, scientists find boron-10, a decay product of beryllium-10. The presence of boron-10 with nonradioactive beryllium isotopes implies that freshly made beryllium-10 was already present in the solar system when it formed.

Hix and then-postdoctoral researcher Andre Sieverding, now a staff scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, used computational resources at DOE’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, or NERSC, to calculate the amounts of different elements and isotopes produced by supernova explosions.

Supernova explosions can occur in stars that are anywhere from 10 to 25 times as massive as the sun. They received help from University of Tennessee undergraduate Daniel Zetterberg working at ORNL, and colleagues at the University of Notre Dame.

If short-lived isotopes, such as beryllium-10, can come from supernova explosions, then, according to prevailing scientific thought, this would support the idea that the formation of the solar system was directly triggered by a supernova.

However, recent calculations challenge this idea, at least for beryllium-10. New data from nuclear experiments, where nuclei are collided to create new nuclei, uncovered nuclear properties that enhance the reaction rate that turns beryllium-10 into other isotopes. This rate replaces an estimate for the reaction rate that is more than 50 years old.

Measuring it in the lab with improved experiments gives a more accurate and detailed picture. The new reaction rates calculated by the scientists are up to 33 times faster than those obtained from prior experiments.

Sieverding, Zetterberg and Hix determined the new rate was fast enough to effectively destroy beryllium-10 in supernovae. As a result, a supernova collapse and explosion “is unlikely to produce enough beryllium-10 to explain the observed beryllium-10 in meteorites,” Hix said.

“This makes it almost certain that spallation really is the source for beryillium-10,” Hix added. “Unless there are major changes in the models for the structure of stars in this mass range, these findings point towards a need for another source of beryllium-10.”

Sieverding said, “As a result, it is unlikely that a supernova was the source of the beryllium-10 in the early solar system.”

The study was a collaboration involving several institutions. ORNL’s Sieverding, Hix and Zetterberg made the astrophysical simulations and nucleosynthesis calculations. At the University of Notre Dame, Jaspreet Randhawa, Tan Ahn and Richard James deBoer interpreted the experimental data to extract the relevant reaction rate.

At the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany, Riccardo Mancino and Gabriel Martinez-Pinedo made theoretical calculations of reaction rates. Since the rate was too slow to be measured directly, their experiments measured properties of the nuclei, and theorists turned these properties into a reaction rate.