Abstract:
Wise interventions are psychologically precise, scalable techniques that help students
make sense of social obstacles (Walton, 2014). Critically, we know nothing about the
effectiveness of wise interventions during transition periods that are unusually disruptive. The
COVID-19 pandemic forced educational systems to fundamentally change how teaching and
learning happens. Using an improvement science framework (Lewis, 2015), we worked with a
Minority Serving Institution to administer wise interventions to a subset of incoming first-year
students in Fall 2018. We longitudinally tracked the success (i.e., grades, dropout rates) of these
students over the course of five semesters. Three semesters into this work, COVID-19 was
declared a pandemic; thus, we compared the trajectory of outcomes prior to and after this
declaration. We found differences between randomly assigned wise interventions before the
pandemic and no such differences after the declaration of the pandemic. Yet, students in our
intervention groups had better outcomes than an untreated comparison group. The current work
allowed us to understand the boundaries of the effectiveness of wise interventions during times
of societal uncertainty.
