A Scalable, Theory-Based Intervention to Influence Teachers’ Student Engagement Practices Improves Academic Performance in a State-Wide Sample

What can be done about the crisis of student disengagement? A theoretical analysis led to a novel behavioral intervention that motivated and coached teachers to cultivate a classroom “culture of learning.” This was intended to contradict the typical, disengaging “culture of judgment and evaluation” in secondary schools. The program, called the Fellowship Using the Science of Engagement (FUSE), influenced teachers’ light-touch practices and involved changes to classroom language and communication around student mistakes, confusion, and grades. In doing so, the FUSE program honored teachers as collaborators (rather than passive recipients of “expert wisdom”) and connected them virtually with other teachers in the program and with coaches who were also practicing educators. FUSE was evaluated in 6th to 9th grade math classes in a diverse, state-wide sample of 80 Texas public schools (N = 152 teachers; N=12,432 students). A control group (randomly assigned) received a version of the FUSE program that taught principles of cognitive science and how to apply them to teachers’ math instruction. The pre-registered, conservative, Bayesian analysis showed that the FUSE treatment program changed teachers’ beliefs and behaviors (average treatment effects from .14 to .51 s.d.), led to an estimated effect on student math performance equivalent to an additional 4 months of student learning, and reduced the proportion of teachers who reported feeling “burnt out” by half, while improving teacher well-being by .25 s.d. This is the only known teacher intervention to influence teacher behavior, student performance, and teacher well-being longitudinally in a pre-registered randomized trial that was conducted in a scaled-up manner. Given the relatively low cost of the program (~$25 per student per year) this study highlights the ability of behaviorally-informed interventions to influence teachers’ subtle, culture-building practices and points to their role as an important route to educational improvement.