A study on effective strategies for encouraging people to vote, I think, has some applications to working in the classroom.

During my twenty-year community organizing career, we certainly knew that talking with people prior to the election resulted in higher voter turn-out. We probably could have been a bit more effective if we had applied this study’s specific findings that people are more likely to vote if we asked::

the would-be voter to spell out what time they plan to vote, where they will be coming from prior to voting and what they will have been doing beforehand.

It’s not a brilliant insight, but it does reinforce the value of having students do specific goal-setting, along with plans on how they are going to get there. I’ve been doing a lot more with students about that this year, and it’s been paying-off.