What Is It About Communicating With Parents?

Our experiment has Math teachers fill in information about students’ attendance, lateness and assignment completion, and then randomly assigns within classroom what information is conveyed to each parent over SMS. Parents in the control group receive no SMS; those in the awareness treatment group receive only general statements about the relevance of monitoring their child’s behavior (e.g.: “Attending classes every day is important for Nina’s grades”); and those in the awareness + information treatment group receive what the teacher informed about their child (e.g.: “Nina was absent less than 3 times in the previous 3 weeks”). The questions of interest are whether awareness alone improves student’s attendance, grades, and drop-out rates, and to what extent adding pupil-level information further improves those outcomes.

2016-07-04

2016-12-02

We will conduct surveys through automated voice calls (Interactive Voice Response, IVR) at the end of the intervention to collect self-reported parenting practices and parents’ views about their children. We conducted a baseline survey through IVR on the week of June 16th, surveying parents about their demand for information, as well their previous knowledge about their kids (Annex 2). At the end of the project, we will be able to investigate if treatment effects are heterogeneous by the accuracy of prior knowledge about children’s behavior and the ones by ex-ante demand for information about child-level behavior.

At the end of the intervention, the São Paulo Education Secretariat will provide data on student attendance and grades in 2016 (per quarter), and enrollment in 2017. Moreover, the Secretariat implements an yearly standardized test to all schools in the state of São Paulo, SARESP (System of School Performance Evaluation of the State of São Paulo). All students in grades 1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th, 9th of primary school and the 3rd (final) year of high school are tested on their knowledge of Mathematics and Portuguese.

The intervention’s treatment arms are as follows:
1) [Awareness treatment] General statements about attendance, lateness and assignment completion (e.g. “attending school is important”) – T1
2) [Awareness + information treatment] Child-level attendance, lateness and assignment completion – T2
3) [Awareness + relative information treatment] Child- and classroom-level attendance, lateness and assignment completion – T3

First, schools will be randomly assigned to 4 different subsamples (A-D), determining the treatment arms each school will have access. Then, students will be randomized within class to each treatment arm:
A. Pure control – ~25 schools
B. T1 + control – ~25 schools
C. T1 + T2 + control – ~100 schools
D. T1 + T2 + T3 + control – ~50 schools

The intervention’s treatment arms are as follows:
1) [Awareness treatment] General statements about attendance, lateness and assignment completion (e.g. “attending school is important”) – T1
2) [Awareness + information treatment] Child-level attendance, lateness and assignment completion – T2
Comparing T2 to T1 and T1 to control allows separating the effects of information and awareness.
There are two main concerns about how this design may potentially underplay the effects of information. The first is that parents may already have (to a reasonable extent) information about their child, such that the key piece of information missing is how to place their child relatively to his or her classmates. In fact, other studies often focus on relative behavior: e.g. Rogers and Feller (2016) inform parents about how their children’s attendance fares relatively to his/her classroom modal attendance.
To deal with this concern, we pursue two strategies. First, we survey parents at baseline about their best guess for their child’s attendance, lateness and assignment completion, so as to investigate heterogeneity of treatment effects by baseline accuracy (Annex 2). Second, for a subsample of schools, we add an alternative awareness + information treatment that conveys parents both with pupil- and classroom-level information, to test whether that treatment has additional effects.
3) [Awareness + relative information treatment] Child- and classroom-level attendance, lateness and assignment completion – T3
The second concern is contamination, or peer effects. While there is a concern that assigning different treatments within the same classroom may lead to contamination, we are less worried about it in this setting parents typically have no recurring interactions at this age – most of them no longer take their children to school, and parent-teacher meetings are rather infrequent in Brazilian public schools. However, peer effects may lead us to underestimate treatment effects.

To deal with this concern, our design varies the exposure to the different treatments across different subsamples of schools, allowing us to estimate spillovers. Randomization will be performed in two steps. First, schools will be randomly assigned to 4 different subsamples (A-D), determining the treatment arms each school will have access. Then, students will be randomized within class to each treatment arm:
A. Pure control – 25 schools
B. T1 + control – 25 schools
C. T1 + T2 + control – 100 schools
D. T1 + T2 + T3 + control – 50 schools
Subsample C allows separating the effects of information and awareness; subsamples A and B allow estimating spillover effects. Subsample D is meant to address the concern about relative vs. absolute child-level information.
In order to collect cellphones and information from parents in the control group, and also to control for the proportion of parents registered in the program, we will offer the control and the treatment group access to send school events through the platform.

Randomization done in office by a computer

First, schools will be randomized to a group (A, B, C or D). Then, students will be randomized within class to each treatment arm (T1, T2 or T3), or to the control group, depending on which group their school was assigned to. Randomization takes place within classrooms in each school.

Yes

223 school

~16000

A. Pure control – ~25 schools
B. T1 + control – ~25 schools
C. T1 + T2 + control – ~100 schools
D. T1 + T2 + T3 + control – ~50 schools

About 72 pupils per school

MDEs for Math standardized test scores: - 0.106 for awareness vs. control - 0.106 for awareness vs. information - 0.150 for absolute vs. relative information - 0.143 for spillovers on the control group - 0.159 for spillovers on the awareness treatment MDEs for Portuguese standardized test scores: - 0.105 for awareness vs. control - 0.105 for awareness vs. information - 0.148 for absolute vs. relative information - 0.134 for spillovers on the control group - 0.149 for spillovers on the awareness treatment