Boosting Participation in Government Programs: Experimental Evidence from the Arkansas Literacy Tutoring Grant Program

• In Event: Equity, Access, and the Distributive Effects of Public Policy

Abstract

Some people decline to participate in a government program, even when they are eligible, the program is free, and participation is likely to benefit them. No government program has achieved 100 percent participation of all eligible people. Research provides various reasons why people decline to take-up a program offered to them, including doubt that they will be helped by it, the difficulty in registering for it, and being too busy. We address these three reasons for declining take-up in a government voucher program to provide literacy tutoring services to young students at risk of being held back in third grade due to poor reading skills.Our study is a randomized experiment assessing the role of encouragement and a simplified registration process on parents’ decisions to enroll their child in a literacy tutoring program. The program provides a $1,500 voucher that parents can use to secure tutoring services from an extensive set of approved vendors. The tutoring must take place outside of school hours, and can be delivered remotely or in-person, individually or in small groups. A total of 1200 Arkansas students in five volunteer public school districts in grades 1-3 who scored below basic on a literacy screening test participated in the take-up rate experiment, which tested the impact of two combinations of interventions. Treatment 1 provided information on the positive benefits of tutoring for their child’s academic success as well as a simplified registration process. Treatment 2 provided both intervention elements from Treatment 1 but added three text message “nudges” usually one week apart. The Control condition was business-as-usual, which included a standard informational letter about the child’s eligibility for the program, school-based events to promote participation, and outreach to parents by school personnel. The outcome measured was whether a parent registered their child for the program during the two-month enrollment window.Both experimental treatments demonstrated statistically significant impacts of comparable magnitude, with Treatment 1 increasing program registration by 10 percentage points, a 40% boost, and Treatment 2 increasing registration by 5.4 percentage points, a 22% boost, compared to the control group within the sample districts, controlling for student demographic factors. Since the 1200 students in the study were randomly assigned to one of the treatments or the control group, the higher registration rates among the treatment students can be attributed with high confidence to the content of the treatments. Focus group discussions with parents suggest that making it easy to register their child by providing them with a QR code that led to an individualized website pre-populated with their child’s information was the element of the treatment most responsible for the boost in take-up. Since the treatments tested here were both highly effective and inexpensive, administrators of government programs are encouraged to use off-the-shelf technology to reduce client burden in registering for programs so as to promote higher levels of program take-up.

Author

• Patrick J. Wolf, University of Arkansas
  Presenting Author