Digital Interventions and Habit Formation in Educational Technology

We evaluate a contest-based intervention intended to increase the usage of an educational app that helps children in India learn to read English. The evaluation included approximately 10,000 children, of whom about half were randomly selected to enter a reading contest, whereby those children who ranked sufficiently high on a leaderboard were awarded a set of books. During 12 weeks after the contest, when the treatment group had no additional incentives to use the app, children in the treated group read 75% more stories than the control group, consistent with the formation of reading habits. Furthermore, post-contest, the treated group abandoned the app 6% less often than the control group. These results demonstrate that low-cost interventions have the potential to be used to instill reading habits in the digital context.