Improving teaching and learning with behavioural science
The Sustainable Development Education and BehaviourWorks Australia teams engage in interdisciplinary research, integrating the disciplines of behavioural science and education, to address a range of educational challenges, including sustainable development education challenges. We work closely with academics from across Monash University and the wider higher education community, to apply behavioural science insights, tools, and methods, to improve key teaching and learning outcomes.
About this project
Education is recognised as the single best investment a country can make, to create prosperous, healthy, and equitable societies (United Nations). Whilst enhancing knowledge and understanding is one way—an educator’s way—of creating change, it is not the only way, and not all education is done well. Within the continuously evolving educational landscape, a behavioural approach to optimising teaching and learning that complements the pedagogical approach, could complement existing knowledge and provide new insights for how teachers can teach, and how learners can learn, best.
There are many examples where applying behavioural science principles has helped understand and change behaviour to improve economic prosperity, health, social inclusion and environmental sustainability (including specific reference to Covid-19). However, little known work has gone into examining the value of behavioural science in education. It is at this intersection that we work, applying a range of tools and techniques drawn from the best of behavioural science to any teaching and learning challenge.
Academic research
We lead and contribute to various research projects aimed to improve educational practice using behavioural insights. Explore our most recent work here.
Framing student feedback: A randomised controlled trial comparing gain and loss-framed personalised feedback on academic performance and engagement
Do loss and gain-framed assessment feedback have a differential impact on students’ motivation, and how do motivational styles influence this relationship? (A research collaboration between the Monash Sustainable Development Institute and the Faculty of Business and Economics, Monash University, 2024.)
Levelling the playing field in ethics education for behaviour change
Behaviour change is a valuable tool for improving welfare, but ethical concerns often arise around its use. Fifty-two government and non-government professional learners told us that common principles, such as beneficence, autonomy, and respect should be upheld for ethical behaviour change, suggesting that a broader set of guiding principles for a more critical reflection on behaviour change practice needs to be taught.
Scoping Review: Behavioural insights in higher education practice
The relevance of behavioural principles in education is clear, however, the behavioural techniques used to modify and improve student and teacher behaviour is largely undocumented. This scoping review aims to identify commonly used educational and pedagogical approaches, for which there is already substantial scholarship, that align with behavioural techniques and taxonomies, and also identifies missed opportunities for the use of such tools, in educational practice.
Understanding contract cheating in higher education: A behavioural approach
Raising awareness and education have been the dominant approaches used in higher education institutions to address breaches to academic integrity. However, the problem of academic misconduct remains unresolved. A behavioural approach can uncover the real motivations and barriers students experience to completing assessments with integrity, and to enable more targeted interventions to this problem to be designed. (A research collaboration between the Monash Sustainable Development Institute and the Centre for Research in Assessment and Digital Learning, Deakin University, 2025.)
Opportunities
We facilitate and deliver workshops and webinars on the tricks of our trade to a range of audiences, within and outside of our University.
We also offer research supervision opportunities for candidates wishing to undertake graduate research degrees (PhD) in an area of behavioural science in education.
