At a Glance
- A large study tested whether behaviorally informed email nudges could improve elementary students’ math progress, involving over 140,000 teachers and nearly 3 million students across the US and Canada.
- The most effective email intervention encouraged teachers to log into Zearn Math weekly, leading to a 5% improvement in students’ math progress over just four weeks of implementation.
- Personalized emails that included data specific to each teacher’s students were more effective than generic messages, increasing math achievement by 2.26% and demonstrating the value of tailored communication.
- Although the interventions were low-cost and had minor effects, they proved that simple behavior-focused strategies could motivate teachers to support student learning better.
- Researchers caution that more intensive efforts may be needed for sustained progress and suggest future studies refine these nudges for broader application in education policy.
American students have struggled with math achievement for years, and the COVID-19 pandemic only worsened the situation. To address this issue, researchers conducted a large-scale study to test whether behaviorally informed email nudges could help improve elementary school students’ math progress. Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study involved over 140,000 teachers and nearly 3 million students across the United States and Canada. The results suggest that small, low-cost interventions can positively impact student learning.
The study, led by Angela Duckworth from the University of Pennsylvania, partnered with Zearn Math, a nonprofit platform. The researchers tested 15 email interventions to encourage teachers to engage with their students’ math progress. The most successful intervention involved encouraging teachers to log into Zearn Math’s platform weekly to check their students’ progress. This resulted in a 5% increase in students’ math progress over four weeks, showing that simple reminders can lead to meaningful improvements.
The researchers found that personalized interventions, which included specific data about a teacher’s students, worked better than generic ones. Emails that referred directly to a teacher’s own students’ progress boosted math achievement by 2.26%. These findings suggest tailoring interventions to individual teachers’ needs can help them better support their students. Despite the minor effects, the study showed that behaviorally informed emails can effectively encourage teachers to engage with educational tools.
While the results were promising, the researchers note that more intensive support may be needed for more extensive, longer-lasting improvements. The study also highlights the difficulty of changing human behavior, even with minor interventions. Future research will focus on refining these techniques to make them even more effective and exploring how they can be integrated into broader education policies to help students succeed.
References
- Stull, D. & University of Pennsylvania. (2025, March 24). Megastudy finds a simple way to boost math progress. Phys.Org; University of Pennsylvania. https://phys.org/news/2025-03-megastudy-simple-boost-math.html
- Duckworth, A. L., Ko, A., Milkman, K. L., Kay, J. S., Dimant, E., Gromet, D. M., Halpern, A., Jung, Y., Paxson, M. K., Zumaran, R. A. S., Berman, R., Brody, I., Camerer, C. F., Canning, E. A., Dai, H., Gallo, M., Hershfield, H. E., Hilchey, M. D., Kalil, A., … Bulte, C. V. D. (2025). A national megastudy shows that email nudges to elementary school teachers boost student math achievement, particularly when personalized. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 122(13), e2418616122. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2418616122
