Messages to Parents Can Help Low-Performing Students

Parent involvement has been a focal point of many policy initiatives aimed at ensuring academic success for low-performing students. As such, policymakers and researchers are keen to explore effective ways to leverage and increase parental involvement. Examples of such policies at the federal level in the US include President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act and President Obama’s Race to the Top.

Are parents involved in their children’s academic activities enough to make a difference in students’ academic performance? Different players in the policy arena hold a variety of opinions on this issue. Some educators have urged more parents to get involved, claiming that fewer than half of their students’ parents are involved at the expected level. Others in the field have argued that some forms of parental involvement, such as checking a child’s homework or observing a child’s classes could actually hinder the child’s academic achievement, as reported by The New York Times and The Atlantic.

One important reason that experts have differing opinions on parental involvement is that it is quite difficult to measure. Indeed, one question that remains relatively unexplored is what methods of parental involvement are most effective and feasible. A recent study by Matthew Kraft and Todd Rogers provides a possible approach for schools to engage parents in supporting students’ success.

The researchers examined the effects of weekly teacher-to-parent messages sent to 435 parents of high school students (34 percent of the total student population) in a summer credit recovery program in more than 30 urban schools. To ensure parents received the messages, they were delivered based on the communication preferences of the parents. A majority of the students in the study were Hispanic and African-American, and many came from low-income families. The five-week credit recovery program was offered to students who received a failing grade in the previous academic year.

Participating parents were randomly assigned to one of three experimental condition groups, each composed of 150 students. The first group received positive messages about what their children did well and should continue doing; the second group received information about what their children needed to improve upon; and the third group served as a control group, so the parents received no communication from the school. The researchers compared the probability that students earned course credit among these different groups to test the treatment effect of teacher-to-parent communication.

There are three primary reasons why students fail to earn course credit: dropping out of a course, failing a course, or being dismissed from the program. In the control group, 84.2 percent of students earned credit. In the treatment groups, students were 6.5 percent more likely to earn credit compared to the control group. This is equivalent to a 41 percent decrease in students failing to earn credit, which is also almost entirely explained by a decrease in dropouts from 12 percent to 9.5 percent. Within the treatment group, this effect is mostly driven by students in the improvement group, who experienced an 8.8 percent increase in the probability of earning course credit. The researchers conclude that teacher-to-parent communication is an effective tool for increasing course credit attainment, and messages of improvement are even more effective than exclusively positive messages.

Through post-study surveys, the researchers found that regular, one-sentence communications increased the effectiveness of parent-child interactions without necessarily affecting the frequency of these interactions. Students whose parents received improvement messages reported that their parents spoke to them more about what they needed to do better in school compared to control group students. Students whose parents received positive information messages reported no big difference in the involvement of their parents. There was no observable difference in the effectiveness of different forms of communication in reaching out to parents—different methods were adopted purely based on parental preference.

Taking this feedback into account, improvement messages expressing to parents what their students could improve upon are more actionable, slightly longer, and are more likely to address issues outside of class that parents can monitor directly, such as working on homework assignments.

In addition to these results, the researchers also noted that this communication approach has great potential for cost effectiveness. A rough analysis of the teacher-to-parent communications shows that the cost of implementing a communication policy is just over $13 per student, per course. The return of this policy is an additional 24 course credits earned per student, at a cost of $200 per credit.

These findings show great promise for policymakers seeking to provide schools with an effective and feasible way to increase parental involvement in children’s academic achievements. Instead of launching elaborate and expensive programs, schools can establish simple and focused teacher-to-parent communication programs, enhancing parents’ awareness of children’s academic behavior in greater detail (considering in-class performance, homework quality, and other aspects of their children’s education). With more behaviorally informed recommendations, parents can make wiser decisions about how they want to help their children achieve better academic results.

Article Source: Kraft, Matthew A., and Todd Rogers. “The Underutilized Potential of Teacher-to-Parent Communication: Evidence from a Field Experiment.” Economics of Education Review, 2015.

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