Presenting School Choice Information to Parents: An Evidence-Based Guide. NCEE 2019-4003
Author: Glazerman, Steven
Date: 2018-10-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: School Choice,Evidence Based Practice,Information Dissemination,Parent Education,Visual Aids,Guides,Data,Layout (Publications),Information Sources,Institutional Characteristics,Selection Criteria,Usability,Design

Choosing a school for a child can be a rewarding, but difficult task for parents. A recent survey reported that parents often feel confused by the information available to them as part of the school choice process. This can be exacerbated by limited time and resources to devote to the process--constraints that can particularly affect low-income and otherwise disadvantaged families. If confusion results in uninformed decision-making then parents might not select schools that best fit their children's needs and the possible benefits of school choice could be undermined. There is a new demand for making school information available to families. The federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) passed in 2015 requires states and districts to provide public report cards that include information on state, district, and school performance and progress in an &quot;understandable&quot; and &quot;user-friendly&quot; manner. These report cards are likely to build on the school choice directories (online, on paper, or both) that many districts, states, and other education organizations already offer to help families navigate their options. This guide is a resource for those considering how to present information to parents (&quot;information providers&quot;). The recommendations in the guide are &quot;evidence-based&quot; because they emerged from a randomized study that is described below. The intended audience for the guide includes, for example, education officials responsible for deciding which information about schools to release publicly, along with designers responsible for translating that information into carefully formatted materials. Some information providers work in public agencies, like school districts or state departments of education, but many others work in nonprofit organizations or other private companies. The purpose of this guide is to help information providers--whoever and wherever they are--incorporate evidence into the many decisions involved in presenting information about schools. For the study, researchers worked with a firm specializing in presenting education data to create an online &quot;information display&quot; of individual &quot;school profiles&quot; for a hypothetical school district. Parents who participated in the study were each randomly assigned to review one variation of the information display--as if they were considering elementary school options for their youngest child--and then answered questions about the display and the schools it described. This type of experiment is commonly used for market research and by behavioral and social scientists to examine the effects of specific variations (e.g., color of a product, wording of instructions, etc.) in controlled environments. For this study, the research team compared responses to the questions for parents who saw different information displays to determine how the design of the displays affected key outcomes: parents' understanding of the school information, their satisfaction with the display and its perceived ease of use, and the choices they made when ranking the schools. 3,500 low-income parents were assigned to see one of 72 different web pages displaying information for a hypothetical district. All displays included profiles for 16 schools with information about distance from the parent's home, academics, safety, and resources. [For the study snapshot to this report &quot;Presenting School Choice Information to Parents: An Evidence-Based Guide. Study Snapshot. NCEE 2019-4003,&quot; see ED589103. For the study highlights to this report &quot;Presenting School Choice Information to Parents: An Evidence-Based Guide. Study Highlights. NCEE 2019-4003,&quot; see ED589106.]