Activity 12.2
Designing an Experiment for Evaluation

A state university is trying to improve efficiency by making sure that students who have signed up for a meeting with their academic advisor actually show up. Only 60 percent of the students arrive at their scheduled time. Two suggestions for increasing that percentage are to (1) e-mail each student a reminder of the meeting date and time the day before the meeting or (2) telephone the student with the reminder the evening before the scheduled meeting. Explain how to use a field experiment to assess the effect of each suggestion separately, as well as the effect of using both suggestions, compared to doing nothing at all.