School drop outs and grade repetition are important problems in Catalonia, being significally higher than in the rest of the EU. The existing evidence suggests that programs that involve families in students' education are more likely to have positive impacts. On another note, the nudge thoery tells us that positive reinforcement and indirect suggestions can produce important changes in people's behavior.
A nudge was introduced in the Èxit Estiu program, which offers free teaching during summer to pupils that have to retake exams. The nudge consists of sending SMS messages to parents, encoraging them to become more involved in their childrens' education. The Catalan Institute of Public Policy Evaluation (Ivàlua) used a randomized evaluation to test wether this low intense intervention would increase the number of successful subject passes in the retake exams of September 2016. Families were randomized into receiving informative text messages, receiving sensitizing text messages or not receiving any text messages.
External Link(s)
Citation
Alegre, Miquel, Anna Segura and Federico Todeschini. 2017. "ÈXIT Estiu 2016: Evaluating the effect of texting parents to improve educational results." AEA RCT Registry. October 27. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.2238-1.0.
The intervention consist on sending SMS to the parents of the participants of Exit Estiu summer school program. The messages sent were of two types: Sensitizing messages, emphasising the importance of the retake exams in September, and informative messages, providing basic information on the program. Students' families received 6 messages during the summer school.
Intervention Start Date
2016-07-01
Intervention End Date
2016-08-31
Primary Outcomes (end points)
* Graduation rate
* Number of subjects passed
Primary Outcomes (explanation)
Secondary Outcomes (end points)
Secondary Outcomes (explanation)
Experimental Design
Families were randomized into receiving informative text messages, receiving sensitizing text messages or not receiving any text messages. The effectiveness of the program was assessed by comparing the mean differences between the three randomly assigned groups regarding the number of successfully passed retake exams and the graduation rate, controlling for some demographic variables.
Experimental Design Details
Randomization Method
The randomization method was pure randomization, done in office by a computer.
Randomization Unit
Student
Was the treatment clustered?
No
Sample size: planned number of clusters
1113
Sample size: planned number of observations
1113
Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms
371 received sensitizing SMS.
371 received informative SMS.
371 students in the control group.
Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)