Personalization of Persuasive Technology in Higher Education

The success of persuasive systems in changing people's attitudes and behaviours has been established in various domains. Specifically, research has shown that personalized persuasive technology is more effective at achieving the desired goal than the one-size-fits-all approach. However, in the education domain, there are limited studies on the personalization of persuasive strategies to students. To advance persuasive technology research in this area, we investigated the susceptibility of undergraduate students (n = 243) to four persuasive strategies (Reward, Competition, Social Comparison and Social Learning) in order to provide a guideline for designing and personalizing persuasive systems in education. These four strategies were chosen because research on persuasion has established their effectiveness in changing behaviour and/or attitude. The results of our analysis reveal that students are more susceptible to Reward, followed by Competition and Social Comparison (both of which come in the second place) and Social Learning (the least persuasive). Moreover, there is no gender difference in the persuasiveness of the strategies. Therefore, in choosing persuasive strategies to motivate student's learning and success, among the strategies we investigated, Reward should be given priority, followed by Competition and Social Comparison, while Social Learning should be least favoured.