Nudging Adolescents Towards Recommended Maths Exercises with Gameful Rewards

Abstract

E-learning systems that force learners to solve personalised exercises lower their control and possibly their motivation. To better balance learner control and automation, we created an app for practising high school equation-solving in which learners can select exercises from tailored sets and are nudged towards recommended ones with gameful rewards. Furthermore, labels indicate exercises’ difficulty. A randomised controlled experiment with 154 adolescents revealed that our nudges made learners select harder exercises without negatively impacting short-term learning performance and self-reported competence. However, difficulty labels did not have such effects. In sum, our study suggests that reward-based nudging is promising to let learners voluntarily engage in more challenging learning materials while preserving selection freedom.