Nudging teachers into the habit of exploring their students' data may help teachers and students get more out of learning platforms, according to a massive study published this spring in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
While districts invested heavily in technology and online learning platforms during the past five years, past studies find educators have not been as quick to adopt the new tools.
"Typically, what we hear with any new introduction of technology in the school system is that teachers are overwhelmed. They have a lot of responsibilities, a lot of kids, a lot of things they're supposed to be doing and implementing," said Robin Lake, the director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, which studies teachers' technology use but was not involved in the current study. "They have limited time for planning time — being able to take a breath and really dig into these data tools."
Researchers at the Character Lab at the University of Pennsylvania simultaneously tested 15 different messages, or nudges, designed to improve teacher engagement on the nonprofit online math learning platform Zearn. The platform provides math practice to students and allows teachers to analyze their progress across different concepts.
A previous evaluation of Zearn found Nebraska students who used the program regularly improved faster in math — but students whose teachers more actively used the platform benefited more. That's why researchers were invited to test the engagement messages on the math platform.
"Talking to people in ed tech, what I'm often told is that the final mile — which is getting people to actually use the tools that they've spent millions of philanthropic dollars creating — is often the longest mile," said Angela Duckworth, the lead investigator of the study and co-founder of the Character Lab, which studies low-cost interventions for behavior changes.
"So much of human behavior is habit, ... and I think that's true for teachers, too," Duckworth said. "If you've got a certain routine and you teach your classes in a certain way, and now people are saying, 'Oh, you should really capitalize on artificial intelligence,' or 'You should use this personalized learning platform,' it's a challenge."
More than 140,000 elementary school teachers nationwide, whose nearly 3 million students used Zearn, randomly received four weekly emails in one of 15 different formats, encouraging them to use the math platform's tools to analyze their students' performance data. The messages included celebrity endorsements from author Judy Blume or astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, prize giveaways, math teaching tips, and analyses comparing their students' performance to that of other Zearn students in the same grade.
Overall, teachers only opened about a quarter of the emails, and there was no significant difference in open rate for any type of message. Researchers found that the students of teachers who received nudges completed about 2 percent more math units during the four-week study period, compared with students whose teachers only received a general message from Zearn.
The most effective nudges were personalized; for example, "tower alerts" notified teachers when their students got stuck on a particular line of problems, and progress messages updated teachers on how many lessons students completed and how much time they spent working on problems.
Teachers who received more personalized messages about their students' progress logged into the system more often and had students who progressed 5 percent faster in math that week. The benefits to student math growth persisted at least two months after the messages.
"Teachers really care about their students, the children they have grown to love in their classroom," Duckworth said. "If you send them an email in their very busy day and say, 'I have something to tell you about your students,' that's more effective than telling that teacher, 'If you read this email, you'll learn something about students in general.'"
Like most interventions intended to "nudge" behavior, even the most effective emails had only small benefits, but Duckworth suggested free emails may help school leaders build habits for teachers learning new technology.
Administrators should watch the tone of their communications, though. In a prior study of nudges, Duckworth found "any kind of nudge has to be in the same tone as you are expecting. Like, you do not expect your pharmacy to be sending you knock-knock jokes in a reminder to get your flu shot."
But CRPE's Lake cautioned that schools should help teachers adopt technology tools and platforms as part of a "broader schoolwide strategy with professional development."
CRPE has found teachers are less likely to regularly use technology interventions if they are simply provided as part of a toolbox, rather than integrated with broader school and district goals.
"The lack of integration and coherence in tech tools and these new AI tools is just a real problem," Lake said, prompting teacher confusion over "which of these tools am I supposed to be using? What am I supposed to do about the data when I see it? It's a bit of a mess right now."
© 2025 Education Week (Bethesda, Md.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
