Leveraging Parents through Low-Cost Technology: The Impact of High-Frequency Information on Student Achievement
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Key Finding
Automated text messages to parents show major promise for boosting school attendance and grades at a low cost to districts. Across 22 schools in West Virginia, high school students and students with below-median GPAs saw the biggest gains from an experiment that sent more than 32,000 automated text messages about missed classes and assignments to 1,137 households.
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Other Findings
Students whose parents received text messages about missed assignments and classes and low grades failed 27% fewer classes, attended 12% more classes, were 1.5 percentage points more likely to stay in a district school, and performed better on in-class tests.
Text messages had the biggest impacts on high school students and students with below-median grade point averages (GPAs).
Reporting absences to parents per class missed, rather than the typical method of reporting only full-day absences, is important. Students are 50% more likely to miss an individual class than a full day of school.
School districts could implement similar text message interventions at a negligible cost. The total cost of the year-long intervention–which included more than 32,000 text messages–was less than $63. The initial set-up of the program and personnel training would cost about $7 per student.
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Methodology & Data Highlights
Field experiment in 22 middle and high schools in Kanawha County Schools (KCS), West Virginia, 2015-2016 school year. [1]
Email and telephone surveys of parents and caregivers to gather additional data. [2]
Summary
Parents play a powerful and influential role in their child’s educational journey, and researchers have long studied the best ways to help parents help their children succeed. Unfortunately, many interventions focus on improving parents’ skills as academic mentors that, in addition to being costly and difficult to implement, often misidentify the key challenge faced by many families: The lack of time and resources required to consistently monitor their child’s performance in school.
This paper shows that an inexpensive, automated text message intervention can produce real results for middle and high school students and their families. Using digital teacher gradebooks and student information systems, researchers sent more than 32,000 automated text messages to 10,400 households with information about their child’s absences, missed assignments, and low grades. The program took almost no extra effort on behalf of teachers but increased communication between schools and parents and improved student performance.
Big academic gains for high school students
In the first year of the intervention, students across all 22 schools in the experiment failed one course on average.
However, for the group whose parents received the text messages, the intervention reduced class failures by 27%. Students whose parents received the text messages also attended 12% more classes and were 1.5 percentage points more likely to stay in a district school. Incredibly, the intervention sharply reduced the number of “F” grades students received, lifting many “D” and “F” grades to “C” grades.
The researchers found that the text messages led to significant increases in in-class test scores (0.10 standard deviation) but found no impact on statewide standardized math and reading scores. It’s important to note that the statewide tests, which were discontinued following the researchers’ experiment, were considered by most students to be very low stakes. This was demonstrated by the fact that students spent 100 minutes less on the tests than test administrators expected.
These effects were concentrated among high school students. Though middle school students whose parents received the messages did attend more classes than those who didn’t, there was no significant impact of the intervention on their grades. The researchers suggest the limited impact on middle schoolers is related to the fact that middle school students had better grades to begin with and, compared to parents of middle school students, parents of high school students had more inaccurate beliefs about their children’s attendance and academic performance.
Text Message Scripts
How the text message program worked
Unlike research on previous information interventions that require teachers to write customized notes to parents, the intervention here leveraged existing digital student information systems to send automated messages. Outside of setting up the system and minor teaching training, the program took no additional effort on behalf of teachers or school staff.
Working with the district’s Learning Management Systems (LMS), Engrade, the researchers helped design a tool that pulled the following student information from the digital gradebook:
missed assignments for each class
percent grade by class
class-level absences
Then, using Twilio Messaging API to link the new tool to parents’ contact information in the school’s student information system, the researchers pushed out weekly text messages to parents of students who had at least one absence or missing assignment that week and monthly text messages to parents of students whose cumulative grade across classes was less than 70%. The text messages linked to a parent portal where parents could find more information about missed assignments and grades.
Giving parents the information they need
In a survey of parents across all 22 schools in the experiment, the researchers found that parents tend to overestimate their children’s grades and underestimate the number of assignments their children have missed. Though a quarter of parents said they heard from their child’s school more than once a month, nearly half of parents said they heard from their school only once every three months–or less. While 60% of parents correctly stated their child’s grade in math, nearly 30% of parents believed their child had a higher grade in math than was true.
To test whether the text message program would produce different results based on which parent receives the messages, the researchers randomized the sending of messages between mothers and fathers. Ultimately, which parent received the messages was inconsequential. Messages to both mothers and fathers produced the same positive results.
From research to low-cost opportunity.
Bergman and Chan estimate that school districts could implement similar text message interventions. The total cost of the year-long intervention–which included more than 32,000 text messages–was less than $63. For school districts who need to set-up a digital gradebook system, initial sunk cost of the technology and its implementation would only cost $7 per student.
Total cost to implement the program district-wide? About $60 a year after set-up.
As any parent of a teenager can attest, gaining a full picture of a student’s effort and performance at school can be challenging. By giving parents the information they need to better support their children, these findings show how tools that help resolve these “information frictions” at home can improve student attendance and performance.
The researchers estimate that school districts could implement similar text message interventions at an almost negligible cost. The total cost of the year-long intervention–which included more than 32,000 text messages–was less than $63. Initial set-up of the program and personnel training would cost about $7 per student.
Footnotes:
[1] Following the results reported in this paper, the experiment was extended into the 2016-2017 school year.
[2] Learning Collider and its researchers use the term parents as inclusive of all caregivers and/or legal guardians in students’ households.