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Year:: 2019
Contributor:: Kalena Cortes (author); Hans Fricke (author); Susanna Loeb (author); David Song (author)
Genre:: grey literature
Subject:: Early childhood; Parents and communities; Program and policy effects

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Description

Abstract:: Text-message based parenting programs have proven successful in improving parental engagement and preschoolers’ literacy development. The tested programs have provided a combination of (a) general information about important literacy skills, (b) actionable advice (i.e., specific examples of such activities), and (c) encouragement. The regularity of the texts – each week throughout the school year – also provided nudges to focus parents’ attention on their children. This study seeks to identify mechanisms of the overall effect of such programs. It investigates whether the actionable advice alone drives previous study’s results and whether additional texts of actionable advice improve program effectiveness. The findings provide evidence that text messaging programs can supply too little or too much information. A single text per week is not as effective at improving parenting practices as a set of three texts that also include information and encouragement, but a set of five texts with additional actionable advice is also not as effective as the three-text approach. The results on children’s literacy development depend strongly on the child’s pre-intervention literacy skills. For children in the lowest quarter of the pre-treatment literacy assessments, only providing one example of an activity decreases literacy scores by 0.15 standard deviations relative to the original intervention. Literacy scores of children in higher quarters are marginally higher with only one tip per week. We find no positive effects of increasing to five texts per week.

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Use and Reproduction: In Copyright

Citation

Kalena Cortes, Hans Fricke, Susanna Loeb, et al., "Too little or too much? Actionable Advice in an Early-Childhood Text Messaging Experiment" (2019). EdWorkingPapers.com Archive. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:956680/

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EdWorkingPapers.com Archive

The Annenberg Institute at Brown University has developed this national working paper series to provide public access to high-quality papers from multiple disciplines on a wide variety of topics related to education. EdWorkingPapers focuses particularly on research with strong implications …
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Too little or too much? Actionable Advice in an Early-Childhood Text Messaging Experiment