Southwest
Description: Parent engagement in their child's education can be fundamental to a student's academic development. The Arkansas Department of Education (ADE) aims to understand best practices for parent outreach to encourage equitable engagement with parents.
To support ADE's goal, Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) Southwest is conducting a study to examine the feasibility and effectiveness of a low-cost "nudge" communications intervention to increase parent visits to an ADE website designed for parents of elementary school students. The intervention provides communications (text and email messages) to parents to encourage them to visit the website. The Arkansas Reading Initiative for Student Excellence (R.I.S.E.) and the R.I.S.E. literacy website hosted by ADE provides the context for the study. R.I.S.E. aims to coordinate statewide efforts among stakeholders, including parents, to improve child literacy. ADE is interested in understanding the impact of the communications on parent responses and on applying evidence from the study to other contexts and priorities for communicating with and encouraging engagement among parents.
Research Questions:
Study Design: The study will use a school-level factorial randomized controlled trial design including three treatment factors. The factors include the mode, presentation, and sender for the message. Each of these three factors has two possible communications approaches:
REL Southwest will randomly assign schools to a treatment condition defined by combinations of the three factors. Each of these are relevant considerations for messaging according to the evidence base. All families enrolled in Arkansas public elementary schools will be eligible to participate in the study.
Projected Release Data: Fall 2022
Research Alliance: REL Southwest College and Career Readiness Research Partnership
Study Related Products: The study will produce a report and a one-page snapshot.
Data management plan: View, download, and print the Data Management Plan as a PDF file (284 KB)
Canadce Hester, American Institutes for Research; Anja Kurki, American Institutes for Research; Andrew Jaciw, Empirical Education