Does information for parents help children’s academic performance?

Responsible researcher: Eduarda Miller de Figueiredo

Paper title: ARE THE EFFECTS OF INFORMATIONAL INTERVENTIONS DRIVEN BY SALIENCE?

Article authors: Eric Bettinger, Nina Cunha, Guilherme Lichand, Ricardo Madeira

Location of intervention: São Paulo, Brazil

Sample size : 287 schools – 19,300 students

Big theme : Education

Variable of main interest : School attendance and math GPA

Type of intervention : Sending SMS with school information

Assessment method : Differences in Differences

Assessment Context

Previous studies demonstrate that information interventions affect fundamental decisions. Agents, when provided with specific information, begin to make decisions based on these new beliefs, making decisions strictly aligned with optimization. Communication between parents and children is an interesting scenario in this regard, because as children grow, their goals may distance themselves from those idealized by their parents and it makes it more difficult for parents to observe their children's efforts in studies.

In Brazil, it is even more difficult to involve parents in this aspect of their children's lives. The main communication technology between parents and schools is handwritten notes sent by students themselves, who may not have the right incentives to actually convey the message to their parents. And in most Brazilian states there are no real-time school information systems for parents to track their children's attendance and behavior.

These information interventions have already been demonstrated to be effective in decision-making. In relation to education, Bergman (2017) found that sending SMS to parents when their child was not completing their tasks resulted in a positive effect on school performance. Similarly, Kraft and Dougherty (2013) showed that frequent teacher-parent phone calls increase student engagement in the classroom. As there was a need for greater integration of parents into their children's school lives, an experiment was carried out to send information to parents about attendance, delays and school tasks. This was thought because when receiving a message from school, recipients note its importance, probably affecting their preferences and beliefs.

Brazil still struggles with educational quality. State governments are responsible for primary and secondary schools, with the educational system in the State of São Paulo being the one that covers the largest number of students in the country. Thus, the entire state has 5.3 million students, of which 700,000 were in the ninth grade in the year of the study (2019) and, of these, 63% were in schools administered by the São Paulo State Government.

In 2015, students in the public school system in São Paulo obtained 4.7 out of 10 in the National Index for the Development of Basic Education (Ideb). This poor performance comes, according to the authors, from a combination of poor infrastructure, low added value of teachers and low family involvement in students' school lives. Even in the sample used for the research, 59% of families earned less than three minimum wages monthly, demonstrating the low socioeconomic status of these parents.

Regarding the students who participated in the experiment, 50% are girls, 40% are mixed race or black and the average age is 14.7 years old. The vast majority of those enrolled in the program are mothers aged around 40. Of these parents, 69% only have secondary education and 2/3 of the students in the sample progress in school as much as their parents.

Such information demonstrates the need to improve the country's school performance and, to this end, it is necessary to try to understand some factors that can improve the school performance of these children.

Intervention Details

The intervention will take place through messages to parents. To this end, parents from the schools in the sample were randomly selected to receive messages via cell phone about information about their children's school life.  

Mathematics teachers at these schools had to fill out a platform every week with student information about attendance, lateness and completion of tasks. Within each classroom, parents were randomly selected to receive different text messages (SMS), allowing us to capture the additional effects of the information on parents' beliefs and behaviors. These messages will be sent weekly during the second semester of the 2019 school year. The messages sent had, depending on the group the parents were in, the following content:

Parents had to provide consent through a registration form, where they provided their cell phone number, relationship to the student, sex, age, race, age, education and gender and age of the child. In addition, a voice survey was carried out to collect self-reported parental practices. At the end of the survey, students were also asked about their parents' participation.

Methodology Details

The experiment was carried out in 287 schools in São Paulo, covering 19,300 9th grade students. Group randomization occurred in two stages. In the first, schools are randomly assigned to each of the five different groups, in the second stage, students are randomized within the classroom for each type of treatment, as shown in the following figure:

In short, subsamples A, B, and C allow us to separate the effects of information and salience. Subsample D allows us to estimate the effect of salience without information repercussions and, finally, subsample E allows us to determine the extent of teacher effects. This last subsample was a requirement of the São Paulo Government Education Department. The pure control group, subsample B, is a randomized counterfactual and its teachers do not complete the platform weekly.

A difference-in-differences strategy was used to estimate the effects of the program and the relevant parameter for this study will be the average effect of the treatment on those treated.

Result

In the initial research – on parents' parenting practices and beliefs, prior to the intervention – parents generally believed that their children missed fewer classes than they actually did. However, it did not apply to the GPA index (obtained through grade average), as the sample was divided equally between optimistic, accurate and pessimistic parents.

The Bolsa Família conditional cash transfer program should be considered, as it requires 85% student attendance, however, parents who signed up for the intervention were less likely to benefit from the program. Even considering this attendance requirement, the program had an effect of 2.1 percentage points, that is, the intervention through SMS was equivalent to an increase of five classes in the academic year. Additionally, the information also made an impact on math GPA. An important point to note is that salience messages make up the majority of the effects, with an 89-126% difference from the information group.

It was also observed that parents who received one of the messages asked their children more about school, encouraged their studies more and had greater aspirations for their children to graduate. Furthermore, treated children were more involved in academic activities.

An analysis was also carried out to observe whether the effects are short-term, where the results demonstrate that messages containing content about the importance of academic activities do not disappear, and even increase over time. The graph below demonstrates these effects over time:

In short, several positive effects were found through the school's communication with parents through SMS, modifying the behavior of parents who began to have greater involvement in their children's school life and, consequently, improved their academic performance.

Public Policy Lessons

The intervention of information about children's school lives is yet another hypothesis that behavioral mechanisms can explain why communication with parents works, becoming more evidence that suggests that parents play a crucial role in shaping behavior and school performance of minors.

Thus, there is an alternative way to enthuse parents' relationship with their children's school life, aiming to improve educational results in developing countries.

Reference

BETTINGER, Eric et al. Are the Effects of Informational Interventions Driven by Salience?. 2019.