Nudges to improve parental engagement and gender disparity in remote education and return to school during COVID-19 in Ghana

• In Event: Using Evidence to Inform At-Home Learning Strategies and Parental Engagement During COVID-19

Proposal

The COVID-19 pandemic led to unprecedented extended school closures around the globe. Ghana’s schools were closed from March 2020 through January 2021. Remote learning was introduced to ensure children continue learning while schools were closed. Equitable access to education is difficult to maintain during remote learning and may increase inequalities by child gender and household backgrounds. In addition to evidence of growing inequalities in remote learning, there is concern that as schools have re-opened, inequalities in which children return to school have also widened. To address this challenge, researchers from a global research and policy nonprofit and a behavior change communications technology company partnered to evaluate the impact of a text-message-based behavioral change intervention on improving parental engagement in educational activities, parental beliefs about returns to education, as well as improvements in children’s learning, enrollment, attendance and gender parity in education as schools re-opened.
Researchers have randomly assigned 2,500 households to one of five groups:
Standard messages: Caregivers receive messages encouraging involvement with children’s learning, their child’s social-emotional development, academic aspirations and engagement in remote learning activities during the school closures and into the summer (3 months).
Messages with a “gender-parity boost”: Caregivers of both boys and girls receive messages to parents, in which some of the nudges include content promoting girls’ education and addressing some common stereotypes around gender roles during the school closures and into the summer (3 months).
Standard messages of longer duration: Caregivers receive the same standard messages as the first group but the program has a longer duration (6 months, into the first term of the next academic year).
Messages with a “gender-parity boost” of longer duration: Caregivers of both boys and girls receive messages to parents in which some of the nudges include content promoting girls’ education and addressing some common stereotypes around gender roles during the school closures (6 months, into the first term of the next academic year).
Comparison group: No messages during the study period.

At the parent/primary caregiver level, the research team is measuring parents’ engagement in their child’s remote learning, parents’ educational aspirations and expectations for their children, as well as the prevalence of gender bias norms. At the child level, the research team is measuring enrollment and attendance as schools re-open, learning (literacy and numeracy), time use, and behavioral outcomes. These outcomes are measured through parent reports and direct assessments for children in two age groups: 5-9 years and 10-15 years. During this presentation, researchers will share results from this study and their implications for engaging parents in children’s learning during school closures and beyond.

Author

• Sharon Wolf, University of Pennsylvania