The role of contests as student nudges on ReadToMe Student Edition

Background

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need to inculcate tech-enabled self-learning in students. ReadToMe®, a multi-sensory AI reading and comprehension platform, was introduced as an app to enable students to continue learning their textbooks and prescribed curriculum. As schools re-opened, ReadToMe Student Edition has evolved into a medium for students to revise at home, as well as for teachers to give homework.

ReadToMe Student Edition helps students initiate self-learning. Within a few months of its launch, encouraged by their teachers, nearly 1.5M students have downloaded the app. The challenge ahead is to ensure that students engage with the app and take ownership for their own learning. Various cost-efficient methods are being explored to enable student retention and engagement.

Contests

In this paper, we are presenting the impact of ‘contests’ as a  method for motivating students. An earlier pilot has indicated a positive response from students to contests. [1] Encouraged by the response, we have developed a programmatic approach to implement and evaluate contests.

The contest that informs this paper was active from December 1 to December 31, 2022.

Awareness of this contest was created through multiple channels:

– In-app notifications

– Push notifications

– Social media campaigns

– Awareness among teachers

– WhatsApp messages to students’ registered phone numbers

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Presented below is the sequence of actions and events to achieve a successful response for the contest.

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The contest was targeted at students from grades 6 to 8 in Maharashtra and Punjab,  from high-density schools located in ear-marked districts. Communicating with teachers to build awareness and  WhatsApp messages to students were the targeted efforts deployed. WhatsApp messages were sent to 4,254 students per the table below:

State	Number of students
Maharashtra	2,732
Punjab	1,522
Total	4,254

Increased Engagement

1,655 students responded by logging into the app and clicking on the Contest button.

We examined the behavior of these 1,655 students during the one-month period of the contest (‘Period After’ in the graphs) in comparison to the one-month period before the contest (‘Period Before’ in the graphs).

Change (if any) in the number of users and engagement was examined for the following attributes:

– No. of users doing any activity on the ReadToMe Student Edition app

– No. of users reading a prescribed textbook on the app

> Time spent reading prescribed textbooks on the app

– No. of users viewing videos on the app

> Time spent viewing videos

– No. of users learning from Quick Tips on the app

– No. of users doing Practice Tests on the app

– The contest was successful in increasing users performing any activity on the app by 4 times (from 10% performing any activity to 40% performing any activity).

– A significant increase (at 95% Confidence Level) in the number of users was observed across all activities examined.

– For individual activities, students demonstrated a directional increase in time spent and the number of times the activity was performed.

Descriptive Statistics of all the activities examined are presented below:

Numerical Columns / Descriptive Statistics	Count	% Count	Mean	SD	Min	25%	Median	75%	Max
# Response Received	365	22.05%	1.44	1.25	1	1	1	1	7
Contest Page Clicks	1655	100.00%	2.49	3.20	1	1	1	3	44
ReadToMe Timespent 1 Month Before Contest	119	7.19%	59.84	127.02	0.15	5.93	15.25	62.42	972.22
ReadToMe Timespent During Contest	433	26.16%	57.71	134.19	0.05	7.58	20.97	51.52	2092.35
Video_Timespent_1 Month Before_Contest	34	2.05%	2.75	2.93	0.13	0.44	1.14	4.35	9.3
Video_Timespent_During_Contest	192	11.60%	4.76	6.17	0.02	1.28	2.73	6.08	38.72
Quicktips_Clicks_1 Month Before_Contest	18	1.09%	6.44	8.74	1	2	3	5	36
Quicktips_Clicks_During_Contest	125	7.55%	7.02	7.85	1	2	4	9	38
PT_taken_before_contest	39	2.36%	6.23	8.12	1	2	3	5.5	40
PT_taken_during_contest	179	10.82%	7.49	11.30	1	2	4	8.5	77
Any_activity_before_contest	158	9.55%	1.00	0.00	1	1	1	1	1
Any_activity_during_contest	654	39.52%	1.00	0.00	1	1	1	1	1
Share Button Click	833	50.33%	2.21	2.10	1	1	2	2	17

App Flowthrough

We also examined how students dropped off at various points in the app after clicking the contest button. We expect contests to be the nudges that kindle flow-through behavior on the app. In the case of this contest, as stated in Figure 1, an expected student pathway would be to click on the contest button, share their information, and share their video, the video being expected to be in line with the contest rules.

The biggest drop-off of students was at the ‘Share’ button and between clicking ‘Share’ and sending their response through ‘WhatsApp’. The drop-off funnel is presented below. This will serve as the first set of benchmarks for upcoming contest campaigns.

Contest Button Clicked	Share Button Clicked	Response Shared	Video Sent	Video Meets Requirement
1,655	833	314	312	234
	50% (of 1,655)	19% (of 1655)	19% (of 1655)	14% (of 1655)

Leveraging Teachers’ Influence on Participation

As part of the contest, separate incentives were also given to schools ranked on the basis of students sending responses. The intent was to felicitate, reward, and recognize the schools and teachers. The objective was to leverage teachers’ influence in creating awareness, driving student engagement, and increasing contest participation.[2]

This incentivization resulted in multiple schools demonstrating enthusiastic participation. Teachers responded overwhelmingly by having their students share videos offline (outside the app flowthrough, directly to the WhatsApp number where responses are received). 139 schools participated providing 483 responses offline.

Teachers influenced students to create videos and send these videos from teachers’ phones. This underscores the engagement of teachers in contests and their influence on students’ behaviour.

Conclusions:

> The contest succeeded in increasing the number of students engaging with ReadToMe Student Edition.

> Students demonstrated increased engagement with various features of the app.

> Teacher incentivization led to their influence on students’ participation in the contest.

> Initial benchmarks for drop-off points in students’ app journey specifically related to contests, have been determined. These will be important benchmarks for successive campaigns.

References:

[1] Driving Student-Initiated Learning on the ReadToMe Student Edition Mobile App – An Analysis of the Approach and its Impact, https://www.englishhelper.com/resources/research-center/2022/08/16/driving-student-initiated-learning-on-the-readtome-student-edition-mobile-app-an-analysis-of-the-approach-and-its-impact/

[2] Live English Classes Influence Students’ Engagement with ReadToMe Student Edition – an Initial Study, https://www.englishhelper.com/resources/research-center/2021/11/10/live-english-classes-influence-students-engagement-with-readtome-student-edition-an-initial-study/