Learning from a Message-Based Intervention in Côte d’Ivoire to inform approaches for education in Ghana during COVID-19

• In Event: Using Evidence to Inform Education Delivery during COVID-19

Proposal

Engaging parents in their children’s education via text messages has been shown to be effective at increasing children’s attendance in school and improving grades in Brazil, but it’s unclear whether this model could be adapted to poorer countries where teacher absenteeism is high and many parents are illiterate. This panel will present findings from a randomized evaluation that tests two versions of this model, using text and audio messages for parents either with or without messages to teachers in Côte d‘Ivoire, and, in turn, how learnings from this study are being applied to inform approaches in Ghana. Using a school-randomized trial, researchers measured impacts on student learning outcomes, parental engagement, and teacher attendance and burnout.

The digital messaging platform sends messages to parents with information about how to support their child’s learning and social-emotional development, and motivating facts and suggested activities to “nudge” parents to engage with their children’s school life and their teachers. In 2018, 100 schools in two regions of Côte d’Ivoire were randomly assigned to one of five groups: 1) text messages to parents, 2) audio messages to parents, 3) text messages to teachers, 4) text messages to parents and teachers, and 5) audio messages to parents and text messages to teachers. Preliminary results show that messages to parents or teachers alone increase teacher attendance, parent engagement, and reduced corporal punishment, and have large impacts on student dropout rates. All conditions increase student effort. But messages to both parents and teachers simultaneously decrease teacher attendance and have no impacts on dropout rates.

Through this investigation, researchers aimed to understand more about how to foster successful home-school relationships, as well as how to tailor behavioral nudge interventions to different children and parents to be most effective, with implications for national educational interventions. Results suggest that future efforts to increase teacher monitoring through such messages should be careful not to demotivate teachers. Adaptations may include targeting a smaller share of parents in the community or moderating the extent to which parents are encouraged to approach teachers. The presentation will focus on how the broader ecosystem of educational actors, namely teachers and parents, can be engaged in monitoring and providing adjustments to their children’s learning behaviors when prompted, which has important implications for educational delivery during COVID-19.

Author

• Sharon Wolf, University of Pennsylvania