Notification from schools

Schools are adopting various technologies to enhance a student’s learning experience. The
parents, nowadays, are well-informed and involved in their kid’s education. With frequent
parent-teacher meetings, log-in ids for school’s portals, etc, it’s easier for parents to be informed
about what is going on in the classroom.

But, is it really necessary to be this involved in your child’s education? Is it even good for the
child to have parents who have all the information they need about assignments, test scores,
etc? The revolution began with computer labs. Soon, they were in the classroom, helping
students visualize and understand better. With so many activities happening in the classroom,
parents were left perplexed as to what was happening in the classroom exactly. The schools
soon began updating their websites with pictures of students participating in the classroom.

An experiment conducted by the university

However, this really didn’t inform the parents about where did the student actually stand in
terms of his class performance. To measure the impact of informing the parents via text
message alert was recently studied by Peter Bergman Eric W. Chan. They helped in designing
and implementing an automated-text messaging intervention to test whether this technology can
resolve parent-child information problems and improve student achievement at scale.
Under this experiment, the parents received an automated, weekly and monthly text message
from school to alert them when their child misses a class or an assignment, or if they have a low
course average.

Results of the experiment

A simple text message from school reduced course failures by 38%, increased class attendance by 17% and increased overall student retention.It was also seen that parents are 17% more likely to contact the school when they receive a text message from school, This helped the school is working together with the parents. They also found that there were large increases in parents’ contact with schools to discuss their child’s academic progress.

48% of parents felt they couldn’t involve in their child’s education because their child does not disclose enough information about their academic progress. This information was correlated with how the students were performing in the classroom. It was observed that students who are older or performing poorly were more likely to hide information about school work from their parents. This statistic further highlights that the information flow between parents, schools and their children may be particularly impeded when the child is performing poorly in school.

By the end of the experiment, the effect of receiving a text message from school was large and significant. The students attended roughly 50 more classes than the group who did not receive any alerts. Also, the group that received text message alerts were regular with their assignment submissions and had improved by 0.09 standard deviation. The group that didn’t receive any messages didn’t submit 9% of their assignments. Students also performed better on their standardized tests.

In all, receiving text message alerts from school about schoolwork definitely help the student stay on course and engage parents better.

 

Related: Things to keep in mind while choosing rite school.

Recomended Blogs