Imagine a teacher; let’s call her Maria. She is struggling to get her secondary biology students to fully grasp a complicated concept, so asks a colleague for help.

Increasingly, that colleague is likely to draw on the “science of learning” in their advice. They might mention the importance of connecting new ideas to prior knowledge and suggest using worked examples or other techniques taken from cognitive science.

But imagine that Maria has further questions for her colleague: “Students don’t seem interested in this topic. How can I convince them it’s worth studying? And how can I get Alfie to stop distracting Jake?”

On these points, cognitive science can’t offer the help that Maria needs. But there is another field of study that can: behavioural science.

What is behavioural science?

It’s a complex discipline, but - in a nutshell - behavioural science is the study of what makes people act and react in the ways that they do. Behavioural scientists draw on evidence from psychology, economics and other fields to understand more about what drives human behaviour. They then seek to apply that evidence to help solve existing problems in real-world situations - in the workplace, for example, or in public health.

Unlike with ideas from cognitive science, which are now firmly embedded in education, the average classroom teacher will probably not be too familiar with the principles of behavioural science. But that could be about to change, if the growth of the approaches in other sectors is anything to go by.

So, what do teachers need to know about behavioural science and how it could come to affect their teaching?

In 2008, economics professor Richard Thaler and law professor Cass Sunstein published their book, Nudge: improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness. The book sets out how “nudges” - which the writers define as “any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behaviour in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives” - can be used to direct people’s behaviour towards outcomes that are beneficial to their health and wellbeing. 

In simple terms, a nudge is an intervention that gently steers an individual towards a desired action. To count as a nudge, Thaler and Sunstein explain, “the intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid. Nudges are not mandates. Putting fruit at eye level counts as a nudge. Banning junk food does not.” 

Their ideas took off in a big way. Just two years after Nudge was published, Thaler was advising the UK government on the launch of its Behavioural Insights Team, and in 2017 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences.

Since being established in 2010, the now-independent Behavioural Insights Team - or “Nudge Unit” - has inspired similar units in other countries around the world, and has conducted scores of trials. It has shown that it’s possible to encourage people to donate more money to charity, to file their tax returns earlier and to stick to the speed limit, simply by “nudging” them towards those behaviours. 

You’ve almost certainly encountered the team’s work yourself - for example, if you’ve recently had a doctor’s letter showing the cost of missing your next appointment or if you were invited to join the organ donation register when renewing your driving licence.

But while so-called “nudge units” have been influencing public policy for the past decade, the same science has so far failed to gain traction in schools. Why?

Bringing the research into schools

One key reason is the lack of literature translating what is often dense, academic research into usable guidance for teachers. Unlike with cognitive science, where texts such as The science of learning by Deans for Impact and Daniel Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School? offer clear summaries of how cognitive science can be applied in the classroom, there are not yet equivalents for behavioural science. And while teachers are regularly publishing new books and blog posts about how they’ve used cognitive science, they’re not yet doing the same for behavioural science. 

This lack of literature is understandable: research coverage specifically for education is still patchy. In some areas, there are lots of robust studies. Many researchers have looked at what happens if you offer students rewards, for example, and at how students respond to peer pressure. The Behavioural Insights Team has also run studies looking at how to increase attendance and how to improve engagement in remote learning. 

Behavioural science has been instrumental in informing the changing restrictions that we have all been subject to since the start of the coronavirus pandemic

However, there are notable gaps. For example, while there’s extensive general evidence about how our preferences change over time, very few studies have explored how this works specifically in relation to schools.

The patchiness of the research makes the job of translating it for teachers much harder, as I found when I tried to write a book about this subject. It means that if we want to apply findings from behavioural science in our classrooms, we need to make bets about what to do. 

Take ideas about social norms. There’s plenty of evidence that people tend to do what others do. I’m happy to take studies around this phenomenon done with adults, and test them in the classroom - but that is not the same as being able to draw on the findings of a large, randomised controlled trial conducted with students the same age as mine.

Another potential reason why behavioural science hasn’t yet taken off in education may be that the meteoric rise of cognitive science has left little space for educators to focus on other types of research. 

Growing from the support of a few enthusiastic voices on Twitter, “cogsci” now influences the entire school system. Teaching approaches that are based on thinking about how people learn - such as spaced learning, interleaving, retrieval practice and managing cognitive load - underpin the new core frameworks for trainee and early career teachers and the Ofsted inspection framework. They have also become widely embedded in classroom practice and school policies. Indeed, in a survey of teachers published last year by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), 85 per cent of respondents said that cognitive science strategies are central to their teaching.

In my view, this is a good thing. As a new teacher, I spent far too much time thinking about engaging students, and not nearly enough time thinking about how they learned. From what I see in schools, the average curriculum, scheme of work and lesson plan is now far more coherent and better designed than it was a decade ago - thanks, largely, to cognitive science.

However, some have raised concerns about the scale and speed with which cognitive science has become ingrained in classroom practice, sometimes to the exclusion of all else. For example, a 2021 evidence review, published by the EEF and led by Thomas Perry, assistant professor in the University of Warwick’s Department of Education Studies, questioned the existing evidence base for applying cognitive science approaches in the classroom and called for more research.

Although cogsci is helpful, it doesn’t hold all the answers, then. For that reason, we need to be careful that an overreliance on this particular field doesn’t lead to teachers missing out on useful approaches from other disciplines.

Teaching techniques from behavioural science

So, what exactly might teachers be missing out on from behavioural science? If “nudge theory” does take off in schools, as it has done in other sectors, what could teachers expect to gain from it?

Here are three principles, drawn from behavioural science, that I think could be most useful to explore.

1. Focus on habits, not motivation

We tend to see behaviour as intentional: Tessy is chatting again, so we conclude that she actively doesn’t want to work. Indeed, perhaps she’s motivated to mess around.  

But behaviour isn’t just driven by intention, nor is it always a question of motivation. A huge proportion of our behaviour is habitual: we eat the same breakfast, drive the same way to work and start lessons in a routine way.

A habit forms when someone responds to a prompt in the same way for long enough that the prompt begins to cue the action. For example, for Tessy, it may be that chatting has become an automatic reaction to getting stuck on her work.

Motivation naturally ebbs and flows. We want students to do the right thing, habitually - to capitalise the first letter of a sentence; make a plan before writing their answer; listen while their peers speak; and so on. When students form habits, they will do what’s “right” even when they’re tired, worried and under pressure - in exams, for example. 

When students form habits, they will do what’s ‘right’ even when they’re tired, worried and under pressure

The science of habit shows us how we can get there: we can work with students to choose prompts, we can practise valuable actions, and we can encourage them to keep going, until the habit sticks.

We can encourage desirable habits, but we can also stop students from doing undesirable things. The evidence offers principles that we can use to tackle this. For example, we can remove the prompt (does Tessy need a different seat?) or encourage Tessy to respond in a more desirable way (if Tessy shouts out when she knows the answer, we could ask her to write her answer on a whiteboard instead). 

Rather than simply trying to motivate Tessy to work, it makes sense to focus on helping her to build better habits. 

2. The importance of immediacy

Brian isn’t interested in the lesson, so how can we persuade him to try? While we already know that motivation is a poor goal (it’s better to have good habits than motivated students), we still need to find a way to get Brian started.

In my history lessons, I’ve tried many approaches, with limited success: explaining how interesting history is, for example, and attempting to make lessons more “fun”. But behavioural science suggests a powerful but underused alternative: immediacy.

People are more motivated by the immediate than the distant. We procrastinate, for example, because it’s easier to delay a difficult task than to do it now. Unhealthy food appeals for similar reasons: immediate pleasure, delayed consequences.

In school, we are constantly asking students to go against these instincts. Work hard now, we tell them, to receive future rewards such as “learning” and “success”, which are distant, uncertain and hard for them to imagine.  

The key principle that I take from the research around immediacy is that we need to make the payoff for hard work - or the sanction for poor behaviour - as immediate as possible. 

So rather than telling Brian that “this will be useful in your GCSEs”, tell him that it will be useful next week. Or stop him five minutes into the task, and ask: “Do you notice it making more sense now?”

3. The peer effect

Some of my favourite behavioural science studies have examined how social norms influence people’s behaviour. For example, researchers have looked at how graffiti affects littering and found that more graffiti makes people more likely to litter. Perhaps that’s unsurprising, although more surprising is the finding that misplaced shopping trollies (another breach of social norms) also encourages littering.

The message for schools here is that social norms are really powerful. People do what they see others doing. So, when things are going well, we should highlight them. For example: “Great to see everyone’s ready.” This is something that most teachers will do already.

However, evidence from behavioural science suggests that when things aren’t going well, we should avoid highlighting this. If you announce that you only received homework from half the students in the class, this conveys a norm of limited effort. Instead, you would be better off speaking quietly to individuals about why they didn’t complete their homework.

On a related note, researchers have also looked at the value of role models. We already know that they matter in schools, but behavioural science suggests that having a role model who is a year or two ahead of students is more encouraging than a peer, because it leaves students time to improve.

Cognitive science has its place, but now it’s time for us to look scientifically at our interactions with students, too. Teachers would benefit from considering how habit, immediacy and social influences all affect how students act - and how these things can be harnessed to make teaching and learning easier. 

If that sounds like I’m adding yet another thing to teachers’ already towering to-do piles, consider this: “nudges” are designed to be cheap and to require minimal intervention. That means they can be relatively low-effort.

Take this final technique as an example. Think about how often you have asked students to write down their homework over the time you have been teaching. If you were to make just one small change to this procedure and ask students to also write down when and where they will do that homework, behavioural science suggests that there’s a much better chance of them going on to complete it. 

There’s good evidence to indicate that this type of planning makes people much more likely to act on their good intentions. It would take 30 seconds, help form good habits and potentially save you hours of chasing. Surely, that’s enough to nudge you in the direction of wanting to find out more.

Harry Fletcher-Wood is head of school surveys at Teacher Tapp