Researchers from Penn’s Behavior Change for Good Initiative, along with their collaborators, carried out am megastudy to explore whether low-cost, behaviorally-informed nudges could support teachers in boosting students’ progress in math.
American students have been falling behind in math for decades, with test scores consistently ranking in the bottom 25 percent globally compared to students in other developed countries. The COVID-19 pandemic further worsened this trend.
Previous research has shown that interventions based on behavioral science, particularly those aimed at improving student motivation, have been effective in raising math scores. This suggests that using a similar behaviorally informed approach with teachers could also yield positive results.
A recent collaborative study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, led by researchers from the Behavior Change for Good Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania, found that behaviorally informed email messages led to a small but measurable improvement in students’ math progress compared to standard messages.
“Our results showed that simple, low-cost nudges can help teachers support student progress in math,” says Angela Duckworth, Rosa Lee and Egbert Chang Professor in Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences and the Wharton School, who led the study and co-directs BCFG. “These nudges worked across different school contexts, with effects persisting eight weeks after teachers stopped receiving the nudges.”
Powering the Study Through Collaboration
The key to this megastudy was the partnership with Zearn Math, a nonprofit educational platform. “Large-scale studies on teacher-focused interventions have been rare due to the high cost and logistical challenges involved. Thanks to our partnership with Zearn Math, we were able to overcome these challenges,” says co-author Dena Gromet, executive director of BCFG.
A megastudy is “a large-scale experiment in which multiple interventions are tested simultaneously on the same outcome, a tournament approach, if you will,” says co-author Katy Milkman, James G. Dinan Endowed Professor and professor of operations, information, and decisions at the Wharton School and co-director of BCFG. “Because all interventions run concurrently and are compared to a common control group, this method allows for direct comparisons of their effectiveness.”
Testing 15 Behavioral Interventions
In one of the largest studies of its kind—involving more than 140,000 teachers and nearly 3 million elementary students—the researchers compared the impact of 15 different interventions to a reminder-only message.
“These messages were behaviorally informed, meaning they were based on prior insights from behavioral science. For instance, one intervention asked teachers to make a specific plan for how they would use Zearn Math that week, an approach backed by research showing that people are more likely to follow through when they make detailed plans. Another intervention appealed to teachers’ empathy for their students, which previous research has demonstrated is supportive of student success,” Duckworth says.
Specifically, the research team found that, compared to standard email reminders, behaviorally informed email messages improved students’ math progress during the four-week intervention period by 1.89%. The most effective intervention, which increased student math progress by about 5.06%, encouraged teachers to log into Zearn Math weekly for an updated, personalized report on their students’ progress.
“One especially promising takeaway is that personalized nudges—those that referenced progress updates about a teacher’s own students—were more effective than nonpersonalized ones,” Duckworth says.
The researchers note that though they are promising, the effects were small. “These results suggest the need for more intensive support than the light-touch email nudges we tested,” Milkman says. “And they underscore how hard it is to change human behavior.”
These findings, Milkman says, suggest several additional valuable avenues for future research, including “more random-assignment field experiments to confirm the causal benefits of teacher-targeted nudges and studies to probe the longer-term effects of behaviorally-informed interventions.”
Modest Effects and the Need for Deeper Research
Additional research is also needed, Duckworth says, “to confirm and explain the benefits of referencing personalized data when nudging teachers. It may be that capitalizing on teachers’ intrinsic motivation to help their students is a distinct and potentially cost-effective approach that can complement other interventions, such as offering performance bonuses and other extrinsic incentives.”
Next steps for researchers are to dig deeper into what makes these kinds of interventions work and how to make them even more effective over time. Future studies are needed to look into the long-term effects of nudges and explore why some interventions are more effective than others.
“The better we understand why something works, the more powerfully we can use it to create positive change,” Duckworth says. “Ultimately, this line of research could help shape smarter, more effective education policies.”
Reference: “A national megastudy shows that email nudges to elementary school teachers boost student math achievement, particularly when personalized” by Angela L. Duckworth, Ahra Ko, Katherine L. Milkman, Joseph S. Kay, Eugen Dimant, Dena M. Gromet, Aden Halpern, Youngwoo Jung, Madeline K. Paxson, Ramon A. Silvera Zumaran, Ron Berman, Ilana Brody, Colin F. Camerer, Elizabeth A. Canning, Hengchen Dai, Marcos Gallo, Hal E. Hershfield, Matthew D. Hilchey, Ariel Kalil, Kathryn M. Kroeper, Amy Lyon, Benjamin S. Manning, Nina Mazar, Michelle Michelini, Susan E. Mayer, Mary C. Murphy, Philip Oreopoulos, Sharon E. Parker, Renante Rondina, Dilip Soman and Christophe Van den Bulte, 24 March 2025, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2418616122
Research reported in this article was supported in part by an anonymous donor to Zearn Math. Support for this research was also provided in part by the AKO Foundation, J. Alexander, M. J. Leder, W. G. Lichtenstein, and A. Schiffman and J. Schiffman.
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7 Comments
Here is a random thought…..
The teachers could just TEACH THE STUDENTS PROPER MATH????
Stop pushing this common core crap as the foundation of everything they do.
Sure the concept of common core is nice but the practical implementation of it with kids just does not work out the way they think.
The teachers literally stop “teaching” the students and just throw work at them expecting the students to use “common core” to figure it out.
Common core has made teachers even more lazy and this is why our kids math scores have only gotten worse since.
That’s not what common core is, and not what it’s about. Numeracy is a big problem, with few people truly understanding how numbers can help them make decisions. And those who do have a major advantage over those who don’t. Common core is about democratizing numeracy, not about making it more difficult. I agree with you, though, that our biggest problem is that most teachers don’t have firm grasp of math or numeracy themselves. This leads to a laziness where they try to let the students “figure it out”, with predictable results.
I read the article which was a press release for Zern Math, and understood nothing.
What is being done to improve scores in math and other subjects is lowering standards and not even testing,
I have several comments if you would like to contact me, I would give you an hour or two. The website as it presents leaves a bit to be desired. I used Aleks with my students 8 years ago and it was much better.
Also ignore folks who probably never taught regarding common core. We all teach math different ways. I have found common core to have many many good features and I taught math, physics, and chemistry for fifteen years.
So the same over achieving teachers who volunteer for the study are the same teachers that when pestered with emails students do less than 2% better? What if we send 1,000s of emails! More emails, more!!!! All the emails!!! I thought from the title that counselors were sending emails to the students to motivate them. Not, how can we turn empathy against the teachers so the make mote plans and more interventions. Why have a 3rd grade teacher teaching 2nd grade math? Why have a 2nd grade teacher teaching 3rd grade math? Send the students who need the skill to the teacher teaching it that day… no extra planning, no teaching 5 interventions just teaching
The human race has yet to take seriously the education of its young.
In the 70’s/80’s, teachers would scribble their lessons on a chalkboard, explain it, tell you to write it down in your notes and then stare at it until you memorized it. This was a lousy way to teach, and it alienated a lot of students. If they would have shown any practical application for higher math, the scores would have been much higher. When I brought this up in high school, my instructors told me to shut up and learn it.
An applied math teaching method is so much better than what we went thru way back then.