Improving School-to-Parent Absenteeism Communications Using Behavioral Insights

• In Event: Chronic Absenteeism: Measuring Impact, Owning the Problem, Improving Policies, and Seeing Change

Abstract

OBJECTIVES & FRAMEWORK:
Schools communicate with families in myriad ways to ensure that students attend school daily. In many states, parents receive truancy notifications, or warning letters, informing them that their child has missed school without a valid or verified excuse. Despite the widespread use of truancy notifications there is little evidence on how to improve their efficacy. This study reports on a large-scale randomized controlled trial evaluating the impact of sending parents behaviorally-informed notifications that targeted potential barriers to engagement on subsequent student attendance.

METHODS & DATA SOURCE:
Many states mandate that districts notify parents when their child has three absences from school without a valid excuse. We partnered with one large public-school district that generates and mails truancy notification letters each month to all parents whose child has recently been reported as truant. The district’s standard truancy notification informs parents that their student has been classified as truant, and highlights the potential legal consequences if unexcused absences persist. We developed six modified versions of the standard notice. We varied the messaging of each notice to target three known barriers to parental engagement: limited attention and low literacy; feelings of inefficacy; and the common misbelief that a small number of absences is inconsequential. Each modified notice was written at a 5th grade reading level and had a primary message consisting of fewer than 150 words. We hypothesized that each would significantly improve student attendance following receipt of the notice relative to the standard truancy notice.
From November 2015 to February 2016, we conducted a randomized experiment with 131,312 truant students, each of whom were randomly assigned to receive either the standard notice or one of the six modified notices. In a pre-registered analysis, we examined the effect of each modified notice relative to the standard notice on student absences in the month following receipt of the notice, as well as the combined effect of the three notices that targeted all three barriers. Our outcome measure considers the sum of full and partial day absences.

RESULTS:
The most effective modified notices (those that targeted all three barriers) reduced absences by 2% in the month after receiving the notice, or by 0.07 days from the Standard mean of 3.5 days (SE = 0.04, all p < .05). This translates into an overall reduction of approximately 3,100 absences among the 45,550 students whose parents received these truancy notices. The letters that only used simplified language and emphasized parental efficacy did not significantly reduce absences relative to the standard notice.

SCHOLARLY SIGNIFICANCE:
This study presents a low-cost, scalable intervention that uses behavioral insights to improve state mandated truancy notifications. The most effective modified notices used 60% fewer words than the standard notice, highlighted parents’ role in reducing student absences, and reminded parents that absences can add-up to have negative consequences on academic performance. While the average per-student effect is modest, sending the most effective modified notification letter to all truant students in a district each year could result in thousands of additional days of attendance.

Authors

• Jessica Lasky-Fink, University of California - Berkeley

• Hedy Chang, Attendance Works

• Todd Rogers, Harvard University

• Carly D Robinson, Brown University