Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/167479 
Year of Publication: 
2017
Series/Report no.: 
CESifo Working Paper No. 6493
Publisher: 
Center for Economic Studies and ifo Institute (CESifo), Munich
Abstract: 
While leveraging parents has the potential to increase student performance, programs that do so are often costly to implement or they target younger children. We partner text-messaging technology with school information systems to automate the gathering and provision of information to parents at scale. In a field experiment across 22 middle and high schools, we used this technology to send automated text-message alerts to parents about their child’s missed assignments, grades and class absences. We pre-specified five primary outcomes. The intervention reduces course failures by 38% and increases class attendance by 17%. Students are more likely to be retained in the district. The positive effects are particularly large for students with below-average GPA and students in high school. There are no effects on standardized test scores however. We randomly chose either the mother or the father to receive the alerts, but there were no differential effects across these subgroups. As in previous research, the intervention appears to change parents’ beliefs about their child’s performance and increases parent monitoring. Our results show that this type of automated technology can improve student effort relatively cheaply and at scale.
Subjects: 
education
information
experiments
JEL: 
I20
I21
I24
I28
Document Type: 
Working Paper
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