Original title: From Digital Workbooks to Digital Schoolbooks: Pre-Practice Instructional Support in Authentic Digital Mathematics Learning
Eileen Richter, Lukas Wesenberg, Felix Krieglstein, Nicklas Jakob Elia Vaupel +3 · September 2026
Most math apps help students while they solve problems, not before they start. Researchers wanted to know if giving instruction before practice helps students perform better in everyday school settings. To test this, they studied a digital math tool used in German schools that expanded from a simple workbook into a digital schoolbook. The platform added virtual blackboards that students view before doing exercises. One blackboard type, called Explore, helps students inspect and connect mathematical relationships. Another type, called Secure, organizes definitions, rules, examples, and relationships. Students completed problems with no extra help, or after viewing Explore, Secure, or both blackboards together. The researchers found that students made significantly fewer mistakes on math problems whenever they received any of these three forms of guidance beforehand compared to practicing with no preparation. Getting instruction before practicing leads to better math performance.
Imagine you are about to bake a cake from a recipe you have never tried. If you just start mixing, you might misunderstand the steps and fail. Now suppose before you begin, you watch a short video showing the tricky technique for creaming butter and sugar, and you read a quick summary of the steps. In this paper, the blackboards are like that video and summary—they provide the crucial preparation before you start the actual baking, and the data shows that this leads to fewer kitchen disasters.
For millions of students using digital math platforms, this study shows that offering instructional support before solving problems can significantly reduce mistakes. It suggests that platform designers should build in pre-practice explanations, not just feedback after errors. This could improve learning outcomes at scale without requiring extra teacher time.
The abstract does not specify whether the error reduction persists over time or transfers to new problem types. It also does not control for how long students spent on the blackboards or whether they interacted with them meaningfully. The study is correlational using within-subject design, so causal claims are limited. The platform and learners are from Germany, so generalizability to other contexts is unknown.
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From Digital Workbooks to Digital Schoolbooks: Pre-Practice Instructional Support in Authentic Digital Mathematics Learning — Eileen Richter, Lukas Wesenberg, Felix Krieglstein et al. — PsyArXiv — doi:10.31234/osf.io/dntbg_v2
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.