Parents participating in the adolescent students' learning process : a text messages' intervention in a math class context.

There is a consensus that parents’ involvement in student’s school life is key to academic achievement, but it can be very challenging for parents to participate. Even when parents have the time required to support their children’s education, they can increase their children’s anxiety about school when they try to help, especially if parents feel ill equipped to do so. The purpose of this thesis is to develop a teacher-driven intervention to involve parents from low-income communities in the student’s learning process and evaluate its impact on achievement in mathematics among adolescent children. To this aim, quantitative and qualitative evidence of a series of intervention studies and field experiments is provided. To help parents feel at ease and limit the amount of stress they may feel, non-technical parental involvement was promoted using activities for the parents to complete with the adolescent student that did not include any formal curricular content and that were designed to be short, simple and playful. The teacher then connected these activities to the curricular content in class to make the activities useful and, hopefully, meaningful for both parents and students. Through the design-based research method, our research team explored whether developing a meeting space outside the school environment between parents and the adolescent student would increase the child's subsequent academic performance in mathematics. Successive small and medium scale studies were conducted (between 21 and 422 students per iteration). This work includes: (i) Two intervention studies to improve the wording and readability of the messages and to explore initial reactions to the intervention of both parents and students and (ii) Two field experiments to assess the effect of the intervention on students’ academic achievement and to explore whether the effect of parental involvement in simple and playful activities would be moderated by the students’ negative emotions around the subject, i.e. math anxiety, prior to the intervention. It also explored parents’ perceptions about completing activities that were designed to be simple and playful. Based on these studies, this thesis comprises several findings. The first field experiment revealed that for a small group of Chilean students (treatment=28; control=28) the 5-weeks text-messaging intervention increased their math GPA by 0.488 standard deviations (p<0.05) more than students whose parents only received test and homework reminders. This effect remained over time, extending into the following school year. This thesis later confirmed that these students suffered from elevated levels of math anxiety at the outset of the intervention. The second field experiment explored whether math anxiety moderated the relationship between being assigned to the treatment and the student’s post-intervention performance. To this aim, our research team conducted a field experiment with parents of 422 Chilean students in 9th and 10th grade to receive text messages over the course of 12 weeks. Half of the participating parents received weekly assignments for non-academic activities to complete with their children; the other half received text messages informing them of their children’s upcoming math tests. The study found that students whose parents were assigned to do non-academic homework with their children performed significantly better on their math tests, and that the subset of students in that group who suffered from higher levels of math anxiety at the outset of the study demonstrated decreased math anxiety after treatment. The overall effect of the activities was positive, but not significant. Semi-structured phone interviews with parents from low-income schools explored their view of the relationship with their child and the school, two weeks after the intervention. Half of the interviewed parents found the activities were an opportunity to spend time with their child, an opportunity that was valued from two different perspectives. As an opportunity to strengthen their relationship with their child and to become more involved in their child’s school life Many parents appreciated the opportunity to communicate, approach, empathize with and get to know their adolescent child better. The contribution of this thesis is showing teachers can use simple and low-cost technology to improve the performance of students that have math anxiety, students that represent a relevant sample of the worldwide population. These findings highlight the importance of offering parents accessible ways to involve themselves in their children’s school lives and also highlight the power of behavioral nudges that encourage positive parent-student exchanges. Future studies should explore further in the role of parents’ math anxiety and develop new ways to engage parents in positive ways into the student’s learning process.