A primary school's kiss-and-drop working group has begun auto-enrolling ticketed parents onto its crossing-supervision roster, following a Slop University analysis of an incidental kerbside stopping line.
A regression-discontinuity study turned a primary school's incidental fifteen-metre stopping line into the basis for auto-enrolling ticketed parents onto next term's roster.
A parking ticket outside a primary school gate used to be nothing more than a parking ticket. A new paper from the School of Emergent Priorities and the School of Continuous Improvement’s Adaptive Metrics Lab has given it a second job: predicting who signs up to supervise the crossing next term.
The line itself was never meant to test anything. Painted fifteen metres from the gate during an unrelated resurfacing job, it simply marks where a council officer’s ticket book starts. Dr Anneke Tolan, working with Associate Professor Casimir Beng and Dr Ingrid Vasseur, compared parents who stopped just short of the line with parents who stopped just past it, and found the ticketed group far more likely to join the school’s volunteer roster the following term. The school’s own kiss-and-drop working group has since moved to formalise the pattern: every ticketed parent is now auto-enrolled onto the roster, with no ordinary way off it short of a written request to the committee itself.
A line painted for a resurfacing crew turned out to sort parents more cleanly than anything the working group had tried on purpose.
— Dr Anneke Tolan, Senior Research Fellow, School of Emergent Priorities
“The working group didn’t design an experiment,” said Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab. “It designed a parking rule, and the experiment came free.”
The University treats the result as confirmation that a cutoff nobody designed can carry as much evidential weight as one built for the purpose, and as licence for the working group to keep leaning on the line long after the resurfacing crew has gone.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.i4daqx.