Middle School Parent Engagement Text Messaging Study--Grade-Specific Program Analysis Plan

Last registered on July 15, 2024
View Trial History

Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title
Middle School Parent Engagement Text Messaging Study--Grade-Specific Program Analysis Plan
RCT ID
AEARCTR-0009762
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, 3:53 PM EDT

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

Last updated
July 15, 2024, 4:50 PM EDT

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

Locations

There is information in this trial unavailable to the public. Use the button below to request access.

Request Information

Primary Investigator

Name
Kalena Cortes
Affiliation
Texas A&M University
Contact Primary Investigator

Other Primary Investigator(s)

PI Name
Brian Holzman
PI Affiliation
Texas A&M University
Contact Investigator

Additional Trial Information

Status
On going
Start date
2020-09-17
End date
2026-08-31
Keywords
Education
Additional Keywords
JEL code(s)
I21, I24, I26, I29
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 grade-specific text message interventions administered during four academic years: 2020-2021, 2021-2022, 2022-2023, and 2023-2024. Below are the school districts that participated in the study these four years:

• 2020-2021: District 1, District 2, District 3
• 2021-2022: District 1, District 2, District 3, District 4, District 5, District 6, and District 7
• 2022-2023: District 1, District 2, District 3, District 4, District 5, District 6, District 7, and District 8
• 2023-2024: District 4, District 5, and District 6

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)
Program website

Registration Citation

Citation
Cortes, Kalena and Brian Holzman. 2024. "Middle School Parent Engagement Text Messaging Study--Grade-Specific Program Analysis Plan." AEA RCT Registry. July 15. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.9762-1.3
Sponsors & Partners

There is information in this trial unavailable to the public. Use the button below to request access.

Request Information
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
2020-10-12
Intervention End Date
2023-06-19

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 & texted prompts throughout the texting program)
- 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, as well as parents' texted responses to the texts and prompts, 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 et al., 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.

This study builds on an earlier text message RCT in District 1 in spring 2019 (pilot) and 2019-2020. That study used a general, non-differentiated curriculum that gave students in grades 6 through 8 the same text messages. During this phase of the study, we learned that parent participants commented that they would prefer grade-specific text messages. Therefore, this study delivers grade-specific messages to parents of middle school children.

District 1 parents who participated in the earlier general program and who enrolled in the grade-specific program in 2020-2021 were reassigned to their initial treatment condition. District 1, District 2, District 3, and District 7 parents who participated in the grade-specific program in 2020-2021 and who enrolled in in 2021-2022 were reassigned to their 2020-2021 treatment condition; see Figure 1 for an illustration. In 2022-2023, we, again, reassigned re-enrollees from those four districts 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. District 8 participated in the study for a single year, preventing an analysis of multiple years of treatment.

For District 4, District 5, and District 6, parents who re-enrolled were re-randomized. The re-randomization of these districts will allow us to causally estimate dosage effects. For example, there will be four groups of parents across the 2021-2022 and 2022-2023 school years: control-control (CC), control-treatment (CT), treatment-control (TC), and treatment-treatment (TT); see Figure 2 for an illustration. This design will allow us to test whether one year of treatment has effects on student outcomes over zero years of treatment, as well as whether two years of treatment has effects on student outcomes over zero and one years of treatment (a double-dosage effect). When we integrate data from the 2023-2024 school year, some students (i.e., 5th and 6th graders) will have participated in the intervention for three years, producing 8 groups of parents: CCC, TCC, CTC, CCT, TTC, TCT, CTT, and TTT.

It should be noted that for District 2 and District 6, there are intermediate and middle schools. Intermediate schools serve grades 5 and 6, while middle schools serve grades 7 and 8. For these two districts only, we include 5th grade students in the randomization. Sixth grade students in District 2 and District 6 are unique in that they have already been exposed to one full year of intermediate/middle school, whereas 6th grade students in other school districts have not been exposed to that experience.
Experimental Design Details
Not available
Randomization Method
Randomization done in Stata
Randomization Unit
Individual-level randomization within school-by-grade blocks (or school-by-grade-by texting language blocks, if there are sufficient numbers of Spanish-speaking parents in a district)
- Grade includes grade levels 5, 6, 7, or 8 (some districts include grade 5 in a middle or intermediate school)
- 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
2020-2021 (same-year effects sample sizes)

District 1: 2,324 students, 46 blocks (school-by-grade-by texting language fixed-effects)
District 2: 2,106 students, 12 blocks (school-by-grade fixed-effects)
District 3: 2,888 students, 33 blocks (school-by-grade fixed-effects)

2021-2022 (same-year effects sample sizes)

District 1: 1,133 students, 47 blocks (school-by-grade-by texting language fixed-effects)
District 2: 943 students, 12 blocks (school-by-grade fixed-effects)
District 3: 1,246 students, 33 blocks (school-by-grade fixed-effects)
District 4: 2,819 students, 34 blocks (school-by-grade-by texting language fixed-effects)
District 5: 3,510 students, 36 blocks (school-by-grade-by texting language fixed-effects)
District 6: 4,976 students, 66 blocks (school-by-grade-by texting language fixed-effects)
District 7: 609 students, 18 blocks (school-by-grade fixed-effects)

2022-2023 (same-year effects sample sizes)

District 1: 3,522 students, 48 blocks (school-by-grade-by texting language fixed-effects)
District 2: 858 students, 12 blocks (school-by-grade fixed-effects)
District 3: 1,245 students, 33 blocks (school-by-grade fixed-effects)
District 4: 1,581 students, 32 blocks (school-by-grade-by texting language fixed-effects)
District 5: 1,584 students, 34 blocks (school-by-grade-by texting language fixed-effects)
District 6: 2,420 students, 71 blocks (school-by-grade-by texting language fixed-effects)
District 7: 319 students, 18 blocks (school-by-grade fixed-effects)
District 8: 133 students, 16 blocks (school-by-grade fixed-effects)

2023-2024 (same-year effects sample sizes)

District 4: 1,426 students, 33 blocks (school-by-grade-by texting language fixed-effects)
District 5: 1,448 students, 35 blocks (school-by-grade-by texting language fixed-effects)
District 6: 2,119 students, 72 blocks (school-by-grade-by texting language fixed-effects)
Sample size: planned number of observations
2020-2021 (same-year effects sample sizes) District 1: 2,324 students, 46 blocks (school-by-grade-by texting language fixed-effects) District 2: 2,106 students, 12 blocks (school-by-grade fixed-effects) District 3: 2,888 students, 33 blocks (school-by-grade fixed-effects) 2021-2022 (same-year effects sample sizes) District 1: 1,133 students, 47 blocks (school-by-grade-by texting language fixed-effects) District 2: 943 students, 12 blocks (school-by-grade fixed-effects) District 3: 1,246 students, 33 blocks (school-by-grade fixed-effects) District 4: 2,819 students, 34 blocks (school-by-grade-by texting language fixed-effects) District 5: 3,510 students, 36 blocks (school-by-grade-by texting language fixed-effects) District 6: 4,976 students, 66 blocks (school-by-grade-by texting language fixed-effects) District 7: 609 students, 18 blocks (school-by-grade fixed-effects) 2022-2023 (same-year effects sample sizes) District 1: 3,522 students, 48 blocks (school-by-grade-by texting language fixed-effects) District 2: 858 students, 12 blocks (school-by-grade fixed-effects) District 3: 1,245 students, 33 blocks (school-by-grade fixed-effects) District 4: 1,581 students, 32 blocks (school-by-grade-by texting language fixed-effects) District 5: 1,584 students, 34 blocks (school-by-grade-by texting language fixed-effects) District 6: 2,420 students, 71 blocks (school-by-grade-by texting language fixed-effects) District 7: 319 students, 18 blocks (school-by-grade fixed-effects) District 8: 133 students, 16 blocks (school-by-grade fixed-effects) 2023-2024 (same-year effects sample sizes) District 4: 1,426 students, 33 blocks (school-by-grade-by texting language fixed-effects) District 5: 1,448 students, 35 blocks (school-by-grade-by texting language fixed-effects) District 6: 2,119 students, 72 blocks (school-by-grade-by texting language fixed-effects)
Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms
2020-2021 (same-year effects sample sizes)

District 1
- Treatment: 1,169
- Control: 1,155
- Total: 2,324
- Blocks: 46

District 2
- Treatment: 1,051
- Control: 1,055
- Total: 2,106
- Blocks: 12

District 3
- Treatment: 1,444
- Control: 1,444
- Total: 2,888
- Blocks: 33

2021-2022 (same-year effects sample sizes)

District 1
- Treatment: 569
- Control: 564
- Total: 1,133
- Blocks: 47

District 2
- Treatment: 472
- Treatment: 471
- Total: 943
- Blocks: 12

District 3
- Treatment: 622
- Control: 624
- Total: 1,246
- Blocks: 33

District 4
- Treatment: 1,410
- Control: 1,409
- Total: 2,819
- Blocks: 34

District 5
- Treatment: 1,753
- Control: 1,757
- Total: 3,510
- Blocks: 36

District 6
- Treatment: 2,488
- Control: 2,488
- Total: 4,976
- Blocks: 66

District 7
- Treatment: 302
- Control: 307
- Total: 609
- Blocks: 18

2022-2023 (same-year effects sample sizes)

District 1
- Treatment: 1,763
- Control: 1,759
- Total: 3,522
- Blocks: 48

District 2
- Treatment: 429
- Treatment: 429
- Total: 858
- Blocks: 12

District 3
- Treatment: 622
- Control: 623
- Total: 1,245
- Blocks: 33

District 4
- Treatment: 791
- Control: 790
- Total: 1,581
- Blocks: 32

District 5
- Treatment: 795
- Control: 789
- Total: 1,584
- Blocks: 34

District 6
- Treatment: 1,211
- Control: 1,209
- Total: 2,420
- Blocks: 71

District 7
- Treatment: 159
- Control: 160
- Total: 319
- Blocks: 18

District 8
- Treatment: 65
- Control: 68
- Total: 133
- Blocks: 16

2023-2024 (same-year effects sample sizes)

District 4
- Treatment: 713
- Control: 713
- Total: 1,426
- Blocks: 33

District 5
- Treatment: 724
- Control: 724
- Total: 1,448
- Blocks: 35

District 6
- Treatment: 1,051
- Control: 1,068
- Total: 2,119
- Blocks: 72
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 approximately 50% of students to the treatment and 50% to the control. We assumed that our model would include 20 covariates and would explain about 33.33% of the variance. Below are the minimum detectable effect sizes (SD units). 2020-2021 (same-year effects sample sizes) District 1: 46 blocks, harmonic mean across blocks = 15.83980 --> MDES = 0.170 SD District 2: 12 blocks, harmonic mean across blocks = 172.3907 --> MDES = 0.101 SD District 3: 33 blocks, harmonic mean across blocks = 72.02920 --> MDES = 0.094 SD 2021-2022 (same-year effects sample sizes) District 1: 47 blocks, harmonic mean across blocks = 11.03975 --> MDES = 0.201 SD District 2: 12 blocks, harmonic mean across blocks = 69.04140 --> MDES = 0.159 SD District 3: 33 blocks, harmonic mean across blocks = 29.79569 --> MDES = 0.146 SD District 4: 34 blocks, harmonic mean across blocks = 17.98736 --> MDES = 0.185 SD District 5: 36 blocks, harmonic mean across blocks = 32.24948 --> MDES = 0.134 SD District 6: 66 blocks, harmonic mean across blocks = 56.84348 --> MDES = 0.075 SD District 7: 18 blocks, harmonic mean across blocks = 31.09235 --> MDES = 0.194 SD 2022-2023 (same-year effects sample sizes) District 1: 48 blocks, harmonic mean across blocks = 59.11098 --> MDES = 0.086 SD District 2: 12 blocks, harmonic mean across blocks = 63.77294 --> MDES = 0.166 SD District 3: 33 blocks, harmonic mean across blocks = 28.74634 --> MDES = 0.149 SD District 4: 32 blocks, harmonic mean across blocks = 16.73892 --> MDES = 0.198 SD District 5: 34 blocks, harmonic mean across blocks = 15.45069 --> MDES = 0.200 SD District 6: 71 blocks, harmonic mean across blocks = 23.01553 --> MDES = 0.113 SD District 7: 18 blocks, harmonic mean across blocks = 15.31228 --> MDES = 0.277 SD District 8: 16 blocks, harmonic mean across blocks = 5.331291 --> MDES = 0.506 SD 2023-2024 (same-year effects sample sizes) District 4: 33 blocks, harmonic mean across blocks = 14.08705 --> MDES = 0.213 SD District 5: 35 blocks, harmonic mean across blocks = 13.51447 --> MDES = 0.211 SD District 6: 72 blocks, harmonic mean across blocks = 17.92936 --> MDES = 0.127 SD
Supporting Documents and Materials
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

There is information in this trial unavailable to the public. Use the button below to request access.

Request Information