Middle School Parent Engagement Text Messaging Study--General Program Analysis Plan

Last registered on August 19, 2023

Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title
Middle School Parent Engagement Text Messaging Study--General Program Analysis Plan
RCT ID
AEARCTR-0009726
Initial registration date
October 31, 2022

Initial registration date is when the trial was registered.

It corresponds to when the registration was submitted to the Registry to be reviewed for publication.

First published
October 31, 2022, 4:44 PM EDT

First published corresponds to when the trial was first made public on the Registry after being reviewed.

Last updated
August 19, 2023, 2:57 PM EDT

Last updated is the most recent time when changes to the trial's registration were published.

Locations

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Primary Investigator

Affiliation
Texas A&M University

Other Primary Investigator(s)

PI Affiliation
Texas A&M University

Additional Trial Information

Status
On going
Start date
2018-12-20
End date
2026-08-31
Secondary IDs
National Science Foundation Award Number: 1918016
Prior work
This trial does not extend or rely on any prior RCTs.
Abstract
Parent involvement at both home and school during the middle school years is positively associated with a range of behavioral and academic outcomes. Yet, due to structural changes in school environments and the increasing autonomy of teenagers, parent involvement often declines during the formative middle school years. Therefore, parents face unique challenges in their ability to both monitor their middle school child’s academic progress and be engaged in their child’s life.

This project covers a set of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of Texts4Teens, a text messaging program for parents of middle school that aims to increase parental involvement by decreasing the behavioral barriers to engaged parenting.

This document describes general text message interventions administered during two academic years: 2018-2019 and 2019-2020. The general program uses a non-differentiated curriculum that gave students in grades 6 through 8 the same text messages. These interventions were implemented in District 1 (pseudonym). The 2018-2019 program is considered a pilot year and lasted 18 weeks. The 2019-2020 program lasted 32 weeks.

Our middle school parenting program, Texts4Teens, is a text-based intervention that seeks to positively influence parent-teenage day-to-day interactions by addressing potential barriers to parents’ home and school involvement with their child. Texts4Teens’ goal is to narrow achievement gaps before children enter high school and beyond. The text messages include facts and tips on: 1) How to best support and guide their child’s academic trajectory as they transition from middle school to high school; 2) How to best support their child’s social and emotional learning (SEL) skills; and 3) How knowledge, skills, and abilities of their child are grow-able. Parents can choose to receive texts in English or Spanish. Every week, we will send middle school parents in the treatment group three texts about a particular academic topic and an SEL skill or activity for their child. Specifically,

--> The INSPIRE texts will be sent on Mondays. These texts are designed to motivate parents on a weekly academic topic related to their middle school child (e.g., asking questions in class, learning from mistakes, sharing schoolwork in progress, talking about report cards, and talking to teachers).
--> The EXCEL texts will be sent on Wednesdays. These texts address the academic topic of the week and aim to: (1) develop specific social and emotional learning (SEL) skills for their child (i.e., growth mindset, self-efficacy, self-management, self-awareness, and social awareness, responsible decision-making), (2) promote their child’s school engagement (i.e., emotional, behavioral, or cognitive), (3) encourage a parenting practice (i.e., autonomy support, monitoring, or warmth) and/or (4) foster a type of parental involvement (i.e., home-based, school-based, or academic socialization).
--> The BOND texts will be sent on Fridays and are also related to the academic topic of the week. These texts typically reinforce the week’s aim from the EXCEL text by fostering positive parent-child interactions (e.g., affective interactions).
External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation
Cortes, Kalena and Brian Holzman. 2023. "Middle School Parent Engagement Text Messaging Study--General Program Analysis Plan." AEA RCT Registry. August 19. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.9726-2.0
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Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)
Our middle school parenting program, Texts4Teens, is a text-based intervention that seeks to positively influence parent-teenage day-to-day interactions by addressing potential barriers to parents’ home and school involvement with their child. Texts4Teens’ goal is to narrow achievement gaps before children enter high school and beyond. The text messages include facts and tips on: 1) How to best support and guide their child’s academic trajectory as they transition from middle school to high school; 2) How to best support their child’s social and emotional learning (SEL) skills; and 3) How knowledge, skills, and abilities of their child are grow-able. Parents can choose to receive texts in English or Spanish. Every week, we will send middle school parents in the treatment group three texts about a particular academic topic and an SEL skill or activity for their child. Specifically,

--> The INSPIRE texts will be sent on Mondays. These texts are designed to motivate parents on a weekly academic topic related to their middle school child (e.g., asking questions in class, learning from mistakes, sharing schoolwork in progress, talking about report cards, and talking to teachers).
--> The EXCEL texts will be sent on Wednesdays. These texts address the academic topic of the week and aim to: (1) develop specific social and emotional learning (SEL) skills for their child (i.e., growth mindset, self-efficacy, self-management, self-awareness, and social awareness, responsible decision-making), (2) promote their child’s school engagement (i.e., emotional, behavioral, or cognitive), (3) encourage a parenting practice (i.e., autonomy support, monitoring, or warmth) and/or (4) foster a type of parental involvement (i.e., home-based, school-based, or academic socialization).
--> The BOND texts will be sent on Fridays and are also related to the academic topic of the week. These texts typically reinforce the week’s aim from the EXCEL text by fostering positive parent-child interactions (e.g., affective interactions).
Intervention Start Date
2019-03-04
Intervention End Date
2020-07-05

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)
- Student academic and behavioral outcomes (using student-level administrative data from each district)
- Perceived levels of parental engagement and students’ development of social and emotional skills (using end-of-year parent survey data)
- Parent and student educational aspirations and expectations? (using parent survey data)
Primary Outcomes (explanation)
Some items related to socioemotional learning will be combined into indices using item response theory (e.g., using individual items from the parent survey data)

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)
Data from the texting platform will be used to examine opt-out rates. Open-ended text responses from the parent survey will be used to examine parent perceptions of the program.
Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

Experimental Design

Experimental Design
To assign parents to one of the texting groups, we will employ a multi-site person-level randomized controlled trial design, blocking on, for example, middle school site, grade level, and texting language, English or Spanish (Spybrook, Bloom, Congdon, Hill, Martinez, & Raudenbush, 2011). Specifically, within the districts’ middle schools, grades, and texting languages, we will randomly select half of participating parents to join the control texting group and half to join the INSPIRE-EXCEL-BOND texting group.

District 1 parents who participated in the pilot year program and who re-enrolled in 2019-2020 were assigned to their earlier treatment condition. This design allows us to examine whether multiple years of treatment has effects on student outcomes, relative to zero years of treatment.
Experimental Design Details
Not available
Randomization Method
Randomization done in Stata
Randomization Unit
Individual-level randomization within school-by-grade-by texting language blocks
- Grade includes grade levels 6, 7, or 8
- Texting language includes English or Spanish text messages (chosen by parent during enrollment)
Was the treatment clustered?
No

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters
501 students in 2018-2019
1,156 students in 2019-2010

48 blocks in 2018-2019 (school-by-grade-by texting language fixed-effects)
41 blocks in 2019-2020 (school-by-grade-by texting language fixed-effects)
Sample size: planned number of observations
501 students in 2018-2019 1,156 students in 2019-2010 48 blocks in 2018-2019 (school-by-grade-by texting language fixed-effects) 41 blocks in 2019-2020 (school-by-grade-by texting language fixed-effects)
Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms
2018-2019
- Treatment: 253
- Control: 248
- Total: 501
- Blocks: 48

2019-2020
- Treatment: 581
- Control: 575
- Total: 1,156
- Blocks: 41
Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)
We used the PowerUp! tool for power analyses (Shiny App here: https://powerupr.shinyapps.io/index/), allocating 50% of students to the treatment and 50% to the control. Below are the minimum detectable effect sizes (SD units). 2018-2019 PSJA: 48 blocks, harmonic mean across blocks = 5.937367 --> MDES = 0.272 SD 2019-2020 PSJA: 41 blocks, harmonic mean across blocks = 7.274103 --> MDES = 0.266 SD
IRB

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)

IRB Name
Texas A&M University Institutional Review Board
IRB Approval Date
2019-03-01
IRB Approval Number
IRB2019-0035
IRB Name
National Bureau of Economic Research Institutional Review Board
IRB Approval Date
2019-07-22
IRB Approval Number
19_291
Analysis Plan

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