Make One Change to Parent Outreach, and Study Finds Fewer Students Fail Classes
November 12, 2018
By: Sarah D. Sparks
Source: Education Week
School and district leaders may be overlooking small tweaks in their outreach that can yield huge increases in parent engagement.
So-called “nudging” interventions—which try to use small, low-cost changes to change people’s habits—showed promise in several studies previewed at the annual research conference for the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management here last week.
One such intervention—alerting parents by text message when their children are frequently absent or in danger of failing a grade—has shown somewhat lackluster results in practice, according to researchers at Teachers College, Columbia University and Harvard University. But changing how parents enroll in the program dramatically improves its effectiveness.