A national megastudy shows that email nudges to elementary school teachers boost student math achievement, particularly when personalized
Abstract
In response to the alarming recent decline in US math achievement, we conducted a national megastudy in which 140,461 elementary school teachers who collectively taught 2,992,027 students were randomly assigned to receive a variety of behaviorally informed email nudges aimed at improving students’ progress in math. Specifically, we partnered with the nonprofit educational platform Zearn Math to compare the impact of 15 different interventions with a reminder-only megastudy control condition. All 16 conditions entailed weekly emails delivered to teachers over 4-wk in the fall of 2021. The best-performing intervention, which encouraged teachers to log into Zearn Math for an updated report on how their students were doing that week, produced a 5.06% increase in students’ math progress (3.30% after accounting for the winner’s curse). In exploratory analyses, teachers who received any behaviorally informed email nudge (vs. a reminder-only megastudy control) saw their students’ math progress boosted by an average of 1.89% during the 4-wk intervention period; emails referencing personalized data (i.e., classroom-specific statistics) outperformed emails that did not by 2.26%. While small in size, these intervention effects were consistent across school socioeconomic status and school type (public, private, etc.) and, further, persisted in the 8-wk post-intervention period. Collectively, these findings underscore both how difficult it is to change behavior and the need for large-scale, rigorous, empirical research of the sort undertaken in this megastudy.
Article Details
Journal Info
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
National Academy of Sciences
Authors (31)
Angela L. Duckworth
Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania
Ahra Ko
Behavior Change for Good Initiative, The Wharton School and the School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania
Katherine L. Milkman
Department of Operations, Information and Decisions, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
Joseph S. Kay
Behavior Change for Good Initiative, The Wharton School and the School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania
Eugen Dimant
Center for Social Norms and Behavioral Dynamics, University of Pennsylvania
Dena M. Gromet
Behavior Change for Good Initiative, The Wharton School and the School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania
Aden Halpern
Behavior Change for Good Initiative, The Wharton School and the School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania
Youngwoo Jung
Behavior Change for Good Initiative, The Wharton School and the School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania
Madeline K. Paxson
Behavior Change for Good Initiative, The Wharton School and the School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania
Ramon A. Silvera Zumaran
Behavior Change for Good Initiative, The Wharton School and the School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania
Ron Berman
Department of Marketing, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
Ilana Brody
Anderson School of Management, University of California Los Angeles
Colin F. Camerer
Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences, California Institute of Technology
Elizabeth A. Canning
Department of Psychology, Washington State University
Hengchen Dai
Anderson School of Management, University of California Los Angeles
Marcos Gallo
Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences, California Institute of Technology
Hal E. Hershfield
Anderson School of Management, University of California Los Angeles
Matthew D. Hilchey
Behavioural Economics in Action at Rotman, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto
Ariel Kalil
Harris School of Public Policy, University of Toronto
Kathryn M. Kroeper
Department of Psychology, Sacred Heart University
Amy Lyon
School of Business and Social Sciences, Colby-Sawyer College
Benjamin S. Manning
Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Nina Mazar
Department of Marketing, Questrom School of Business, Boston University
Michelle Michelini
Harris School of Public Policy, University of Toronto
Susan E. Mayer
Harris School of Public Policy, University of Toronto
Mary C. Murphy
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University
Philip Oreopoulos
Department of Economics, University of Toronto
Sharon E. Parker
Consultant
Renante Rondina
Behavioural Economics in Action at Rotman, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto
Dilip Soman
Behavioural Economics in Action at Rotman, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto
Christophe Van den Bulte
Department of Marketing, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania