Reducing Parent-School Information Gaps and Improving Education Outcomes: Evidence from High-Frequency Text Messages

Samuel Berlinski, Matias Busso, Taryn Dinkelman and Claudia Martínez A.
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Claudia Martínez A.

No 28581, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We conducted an experiment in low-income urban schools in Chile to test the effects and behavioral changes triggered by a program that sends attendance, grade, and classroom behavior information to parents via weekly and monthly text messages. Our 18-month intervention raised average math scores by 0.09 of a standard deviation and increased the share of students satisfying attendance requirements for grade promotion by 4.7 percentage points. Treatment effects were larger for students at higher risk of later grade retention and dropout. Our results demonstrate that communicating existing school information to parents frequently can shrink parent-school information gaps and improve school outcomes in a light-touch, scalable, and cost-effective way.

JEL-codes: D8 I25 N36 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-exp, nep-lam and nep-ure
Note: CH DEV ED
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w28581.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Reducing Parent-School Information Gaps and Improving Education Outcomes: Evidence from High-Frequency Text Messages (2021)
Working Paper: Reducing Parent-School Information Gaps and Improving Education Outcomes: Evidence from High-Frequency Text Messages (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:28581

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w28581

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().