Despite documented benefits to college completion, more than a third of students who initially enroll in college do not ultimately earn a credential. Completing college requires students to navigate both institutional administrative tasks (e.g., registering for classes) and academic tasks within courses (e.g., completing homework). In postsecondary education, several promising interventions have shown that text-based outreach and communication can be a low-cost, easy to implement, and effective strategy for supporting administrative task navigation. In this paper, we report on a randomized controlled trial testing the effect of a text-based chatbot with artificial intelligence (AI) capability on students' academic task navigation. We find the academic chatbot significantly shifted students’ final grades, increasing the likelihood students received a course grade of B or higher by eight percentage points. We find large and significant treatment effects for first-generation students, estimating the intervention increased their final course grades by about 11 points on a 100-point scale (and a 16 percentage point increase in earning a B or higher) as well as their completion of and performance on individual course deliverables (e.g., readings, activities, exams).
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