Using Behavioral Insights to Increase Attendance at Subsidized Preschool Programs: The Show Up to Grow Up Intervention

• In Event: 3-248 - Text Me: Promoting Family Engagement and Child Outcomes Through Texting

Integrative Statement

Introduction
To date, there has been little experimental work demonstrating the effectiveness of a behaviorally-informed approach to supporting increased parent engagement in general or parental support of children’s preschool attendance in particular in low-income households. This is an important problem given the well-known gaps in children’s readiness for formal schooling by family background.

Hypothesis
Parents of preschool age children may be especially susceptible to behavioral bottlenecks affecting children’s attendance because preschool is not compulsory. Parents might also be more likely to ensure their children’s attendance at compulsory school and not preschool because they expect a higher return to compulsory school or they fear repercussions from not complying with compulsory school rules. Either explanation suggests that a significant number of parents can overcome barriers when they are motivated to do so. In our prior studies of low-income families with preschoolers, we have shown that behavioral tools can boost parental engagement (Mayer et al., 2018). We test the first behaviorally informed intervention on how to reduce absenteeism among low-income children attending federally subsidized preschool programs.

Methods and Study Population
We implemented a behaviorally-informed field experiment called Show Up to Grow Up designed to increase attendance and diminish chronic absences at subsidized preschool programs in Chicago. Our program, the SUGU intervention, uses outcomes that are measures of actual behavior based on attendance records provided by the preschool centers. We sent personalized text-messages to parents, targeting behavioral bottlenecks driving children’s absences from preschool. A total of 741 children in nine preschool centers participated for 18 weeks in our program during the regular academic year.

Results
Using rich administrative records from preschools, we find that our intervention increased attended days by 2.5 (0.15 standard deviations) and decreased chronic absenteeism by 9.3 percentage points (20%) over an 18-week period. Our results show that the average effect is driven by changes between the bottom quartile and the median of the attendance distribution. These results are consistent with parents of children at the bottom of the attendance distribution having structural obstacles not overcome using behavioral tools and little room for improved attendance at the very top of the distribution.

Authors

• Ariel Kalil, University of Chicago
  Non-Presenting Author

• Susan Mayer, University of Chicago
  Non-Presenting Author

• Sebastian Gallegos, Inter-American Development Bank
  Presenting Author