High rates of absenteeism, grade repetition and poor grades continue to undermine educational investments for children from lower income families in Chile. As a result, despite massive increases in access to high school and post-secondary education in the last two decades, there is still tremendous educational inequality in this country. One problem is that although attendance and performance in lower grades is highly predictive of grade repetition and drop out in later grades, parents may not always be aware of this link. Moreover, we have seen in prior work that parents may not always have the correct information about child behaviors in school. This project targets two aspects of parental involvement with the school system: information and skills. We designed an experiment to randomly provide parents with regular information about children’s activities and behavior at school, using text messages. After some time using this SMS program, we treat a subset of these parents with a complementary investment that informs them how to use these markers (attendance, grades, behavior) to monitor and guide their children towards improved investments in school.
External Link(s)
Citation
Berlinski, Samuel et al. 2014. "Parent-School Communication based on text messages (SMS)." AEA RCT Registry. August 06. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.458-1.0.
Main outcomes include: Grades, Attendance, Behavior, Dropout
Primary Outcomes (explanation)
Secondary Outcomes (end points)
Secondary Outcomes (explanation)
Experimental Design
The intervention will take place in public schools in a municipality of Santiago. Regular text messages will be sent to parents of students from 4th to 8th grade with information on Attendance, Grades and Behavior. Data for these messages will be collected from schools by our enumerators. Control SMS messages will be sent to all participants, with general information about school events.
After an initial period of treatment, a subset of treatment group parents will be randomly offered a complementary investment (a DVD program). This program will provide new parental management tools aimed at better use of the school information delivered via text messaging. The complementary investment will be designed in consultation with educational psychologists, building on their best practice tools for encouraging parental involvement in low-income communities.
Experimental Design Details
Randomization Method
Computerized (STATA programming)
Randomization Unit
Class and Individual (by students)
Was the treatment clustered?
No
Sample size: planned number of clusters
Not applicable
Sample size: planned number of observations
2,600 parents and caregivers (approx.)
Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms
1,300 parents (approx.) in each group, treatment and control.
Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)