Flourishing is contagious: Digital wellbeing training with educators improves student achievement

The COVID-19 pandemic profoundly impacted America’s educational systems. Educators are on average reporting clinically significant levels of distress, student achievement declined and has not recovered, and longstanding sociodemographic inequities in student achievement grew. In a preregistered trial of a four-week digital wellbeing training with 827 educators, improvements on the primary and most secondary outcomes were observed, which replicated a prior smaller study. In the first preregistered test of the effect of teacher wellbeing training on broad-based standardized student achievement outcomes, students (n=13,660) of teachers (teacher n=248) randomly assigned to digital wellbeing training made statistically significant end of year gains in mathematics performance. The observed gains were 200–300% larger than the average effect of three decades of intervention research targeting similar outcomes, and robust to all alternative modeling and sampling approaches evaluated. Digital wellbeing training for educators is a scalable, cost-effective approach to reducing educator distress that may also support pandemic era learning loss recovery.