| Field | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Field Trial Status | Before in_development | After on_going |
| Field Abstract | Before Evaluating Learning Interactions (ELI) aims to examine the efficacy of two contrasting approaches to help low-income parents improve the school readiness skills of their 3-5 year-old children. ELI is a six-month text-based program delivered to a sample of 500 low-income families in Chicagoland. One treatment encourages parents to engage in “constrained learning” interactions and another treatment encourages “unconstrained learning” interactions. In constrained learning interactions, parents teach their children constrained skills—knowledge that has a correct answer, such as letter and number recognition. Unconstrained learning interactions are open-ended and convey skills with no correct answer (unconstrained skills), such as problem-solving and curiosity. Both constrained and unconstrained skills are necessary for school readiness. The outcomes of this RCT are measures of children’s constrained and unconstrained skills. Our hypothesis which follows from some preliminary evidence, is that motivating unconstrained parent-child learning interactions will increase children’s constrained and unconstrained skills more than motivating constrained learning interactions. This RCT builds on a pilot project funded by J-PAL that both demonstrated the feasibility of this project and built the community partnerships that will support the proposed new work. | After Evaluating Learning Interactions (ELI) is an RCT intended to help low-income parents improve the literacy skills and curiosity of their 3-5 year-old children. One of two treatments encourages parents to engage in traditional academic interactions with their child and the second encourages curiosity-based interactions. In academic interactions parents engage their children in activities intended to convey specific information such as new vocabulary words and letter sounds or recognition. In curiosity-based interactions parents engage in open-ended conversation to promote curiosity. The outcomes of this RCT are measures of children’s literacy skills and curiosity. Our hypothesis is that motivating curiosity-based parent-child interactions will increase children’s literacy skills, curiosity, and enthusiasm for learning more than motivating academic interactions but both treatments will increase literacy skills more than the control group. ELI is a six-month text-based program for low-income families. |
| Field Trial End Date | Before December 31, 2023 | After June 30, 2024 |
| Field Last Published | Before December 23, 2021 10:58 AM | After March 22, 2023 11:15 AM |
| Field Intervention (Public) | Before The ELI intervention will send 3–4 text messages per week to parents in two treatment groups. One treatment will send parents messages promoting unconstrained learning interactions, such as guides to conversation and creative activities that parents can do with their children. The second treatment will send parents messages promoting constrained learning interactions, such as literacy lessons on letter recognition, phonics, and vocabulary. We will not have a control group because the intent of ELI is to test the relative efficacy of the two different approaches to encourage parents to interact with their children to promote school readiness in the domain of literacy skills. We focus only on literacy skills so that we can concentrate messaging on only one skill to maximize impact and minimize the length of the assessments. Each treatment will be delivered over six months by text messages in Spanish and English. | After The ELI intervention will send 3–4 text messages per week to parents in two treatment groups and one control group. One treatment will send parents messages promoting unconstrained learning interactions, such as guides to open-ended conversation and play that parents can do with their children. The second treatment will send parents messages promoting constrained learning interactions, such as direct instruction on literacy skills where the goal is a correct response from children. Control messages will be unrelated to promoting children's skill development. We focus only on literacy skills so that we can concentrate messaging on only one skill to maximize impact and minimize the length of the assessments. Each treatment will be delivered over six months by text messages in Spanish and English. |
| Field Intervention Start Date | Before November 28, 2022 | After May 01, 2023 |
| Field Intervention End Date | Before May 31, 2023 | After January 31, 2024 |
| Field Experimental Design (Public) | Before We will recruit low-income families with preschool-aged children in collaboration with our implementation partners. All recruited parents will be offered half of their incentive payment upon enrollment in ELI and the other half upon completion of the postintervention parent survey and child assessments. Consent will be actively obtained from participants and contact information and demographic data will be collected upon enrollment. Enrolled parents will be randomized into one of the two treatment groups. Baseline parent surveys and child assessments of literacy and curiosity will be administered just prior to the start of the intervention. As part of the 6-month intervention, parents will receive 3-4 text messages per week in their native language of English or Spanish promoting either constrained or unconstrained learning interactions with their children. Periodically parents will be asked to text back a response indicating they are engaged with the ELI program. At the end of the intervention, endline parent surveys and child assessments will be administered. | After We will recruit low-income families with preschool-aged children in collaboration with our implementation partners. All recruited parents will be offered half of their incentive payment upon enrollment in ELI and the other half upon completion of the post-intervention parent survey and child assessments. Consent will be actively obtained from participants and contact information and demographic data will be collected upon enrollment. Enrolled parents will be randomized into one of the two treatment groups or the control group. Baseline parent surveys and child assessments of literacy and curiosity will be administered just prior to the start of the intervention. As part of the 6-month intervention, parents will receive 3-4 text messages per week in their native language of English or Spanish. Periodically parents will be asked to text back a response indicating they are engaged with the ELI program. At the end of the intervention, endline parent surveys and child assessments will be administered. |
| Field Randomization Method | Before Consented and enrolled parents will be randomized using a computer program - likely Stata. | After Consented and enrolled parents will be randomized using a computer program i.e. Stata. |
| Field Planned Number of Clusters | Before 500 families | After 750 families |
| Field Planned Number of Observations | Before 500 families | After 750 families |
| Field Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms | Before 250 families in treatment promoting unconstrained learning interactions; 250 families in treatment promoting constrained learning interactions | After 250 families in treatment promoting unconstrained learning interactions; 250 families in treatment promoting constrained learning interactions; 250 families in control group |
| Field Power calculation: Minimum Detectable Effect Size for Main Outcomes | Before We set power to 80% and the significance level to p=.05. MDES= 0.1 if Treatment 1 (T1) scores twice as many points as Treatment 2 (T2) as long as T2 answers 10% of questions correctly. When the difference between T1 and T2 drops to 50%, we would be able to detect the treatment effect as long as T2 answers 25% of questions correctly. | After We set power to 80% and the significance level to p=.05. Under these assumptions the standardized minimum detectable effect size (MDSE) is 0.25 on literacy skills (mean difference of 3.75 with a SD of 15 on PPVT). Assuming the measure of curiosity has 8 chances to choose a novel or familiar item, the MDSE is 0.25 (mean difference of 0.33 with a SD of 1.33 given a normal distribution from 0 to 8). Furthermore, assuming the measures of curiosity contain measurement error with a reliability coefficient R of 0.75, the calculation of the attenuated effect size from Phillips and Jiang (2016) gives a MDSE of around 0.29. |
| Field Intervention (Hidden) | Before Treatment 1: Messages promoting unconstrained learning interactions. Perhaps the most important unconstrained learning activity for parents to engage in with their child is simple conversation. Research shows that differences in language input result in disparities among children in lexical and grammatical development, both within and between socioeconomic groups (Hart & Risley, 1995; Hoff, 2003; Huttenlocher et al., 2010; Pan et al., 2005; Rowe & Goldin-Meadow, 2009). Parents in this treatment group will receive 3–4 messages per week that are guides to conversation and creative activities that parents can do with their children. Examples of messages taken from our PEAKS pilot as follows: “Ask [CHILD NAME] ‘If you could have one superpower, what would it be?’ Text back what superpower [CHILD NAME] chose!”; and “Let [CHILD NAME] choose a story and read it together! Text back the title of the book [CHILD NAME] chose.” Over time the messages also include encouragement to expand the conversation, such as “Ask [CHILD NAME] ‘If you could have one superpower, how would you use it to help others?’”; and “Let [CHILD NAME] choose a story and read it together! And then ask [CHILD NAME] to tell you what happened in the story in his/her own words!” Treatment 2: Messages promoting constrained learning interactions. This treatment will send parents text messages each week that provide specific literacy-related lessons for parents to engage in with their child. Consistent with the Head Start Approaches to Learning, these lessons will focus on letter recognition, letter sounds, and vocabulary. For example, a text to parents in this treatment might be as follows: “Today focus on the letter B. Help your child think of 4 words that start with the letter B.” Throughout both treatments we will occasionally send parents “engagement prompts.” An engagement prompt is a request for parents to engage their child in an activity or a conversation and then text back a response indicating that the task was completed. An example of an engagement prompt for the unconstrained learning interaction treatment groups is as follows: “Ask [CHILD NAME], ‘What would be your perfect afternoon?’ Text back the response.” For the constrained learning interaction treatment groups an engagement prompt might be the following: “Ask [CHILD NAME], ‘What rhymes with big?’ Text back the response.” We will also employ additional strategies to boost and maintain parents’ engagement with the program. In both treatment groups we will use parent identity salience framing for many of the messages because, as noted above, this framing improved parent involvement in a prior text-based parent engagement program that we evaluated. An example of identity salience framing is this: “Be the parent you want to be for [CHILD NAME]!” This is then followed by the message particular to the treatment group of the parent. In both treatment groups, we will also provide inducements throughout the program to boost attention to the messages. These inducements can include texting back to parents when they respond to an engagement prompt, providing recognition to parents who respond, and so on. These will be the same for both treatment groups. | After Treatment 1: Academic learning. Messages in this group will provide parents with a new vocabulary word and its definition and will prompt parents to teach the child that word. An example of such a message is: “[CHILD NAME] learns from you each day! Share today's word with [CHILD NAME]. A SHIP is a very big boat that can carry people or things across the sea. Ask [CHILD NAME]: What is a ship? Is a ship big or small?” Treatment 2: Curiosity-based learning. Parents in this group will receive messages with the same vocabulary word as the parents in Treatment 1, but the messages will guide parent-child conversation about the word, encouraging abstract and open-ended interaction. An example of this kind of messaging is “[CHILD NAME] learns from you each day! Today, tell [CHILDNAME]: A ship is a very big boat that can carry people or things across the sea. Ask [CHILD NAME]: Have you been on a SHIP? What do you think it would be like to be on a ship? Where would you like to go on a ship?” Control: Placebo messages. The control group will receive messages about topics unrelated to parent-child learning interactions. Throughout both treatments we will occasionally send parents “engagement prompts.” An engagement prompt is a request for parents to engage their child in an activity or a conversation and then text back a response indicating that the task was completed. We will also employ additional strategies to boost and maintain parents’ engagement with the program. In both treatment groups we will use parent identity salience framing for many of the messages because, as noted above, this framing improved parent involvement in a prior text-based parent engagement program that we evaluated. An example of identity salience framing is this: “Be the parent you want to be for [CHILD NAME]!” This is then followed by the message particular to the treatment group of the parent. In both treatment groups, we will also provide inducements throughout the program to boost attention to the messages. These inducements can include texting back to parents when they respond to an engagement prompt, providing recognition to parents who respond, and so on. These will be the same for both treatment groups. |
| Field Public analysis plan | Before No | After Yes |
| Field | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Field Document | Before |
After
ELI Pre-Analysis Plan.pdf
MD5:
6d84be220d38b3c89ce91eff405d9097
SHA1:
a55fb3887f1713bf898d16ce7ad0d2e012c0e10e
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| Field Title | Before | After ELI PAP 2023 |