Parental Engagement in Child Schooling

Ivory Coast hosts ap­prox­i­mate­ly 2/3 of the world pro­duc­tion of co­coa. This has been linked to one of the high­est in­ci­dences of child la­bor world­wide, with al­most 2 mil­lion chil­dren em­ployed in co­coa fields. In that con­text, chil­dren’s ed­u­ca­tion is threat­ened not only by child la­bor, but also by teach­ers’ lim­it­ed ef­fort to sup­port stu­dents in this chal­leng­ing en­vi­ron­ment. Re­search shows that teach­ers are of­ten ab­sent from the class­room in de­vel­op­ing coun­tries, and even when they are not, they of­ten spend lit­tle time on task or tar­get in­struc­tion to the top of the class. In light of those facts, it is not sur­pris­ing that learn­ing out­comes are very poor: in coun­tries like Ivory Coast, 2 out of 3 stu­dents can­not read at the ap­pro­pri­ate age, and al­most 5% of stu­dents drop out of school every year, even from a very young age.

CCWD supports the Sustainable Development Goals

The Sus­tain­able De­vel­op­ment Goals of this Pro­ject

This project stud­ies whether mon­i­tor­ing teach­ers through dif­fer­ent strate­gies can im­prove learn­ing out­comes in Ivory Coast. We ran­dom­ly as­sign teach­ers across 100 pub­lic schools to two dif­fer­ent types of mon­i­tor­ing, di­rect and in­di­rect. Aimed at en­cour­ag­ing teach­ers to be more present in class and to check whether they are putting in enough ef­fort, di­rect mon­i­tor­ing in­volves send­ing week­ly text mes­sages sent di­rect­ly to their phones in part­ner­ship with the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion. In­di­rect mon­i­tor­ing, on the oth­er hand, aims to mo­ti­vate the pri­ma­ry care­givers of the stu­dents taught by those teach­ers to show up in school more of­ten to check in on what their chil­dren are learn­ing through com­mu­ni­ty mo­bi­liza­tion, again by send­ing week­ly text mes­sages.

Mes­sages to par­ents in­duced them to show up in school more fre­quent­ly, which both stu­dents and teach­ers not­ed. Teach­ers who were less like­ly to be in class at the base­line showed up in school to a greater ex­tent, rel­a­tive to the con­trol group, and ‘taught to the top’ to a less­er ex­tent. As a re­sult, at the end of the school year, stu­dents whose par­ents were ran­dom­ly as­signed to re­ceive mes­sages from the school were about one school quar­ter more ad­vanced in nu­mer­a­cy and lit­er­a­cy, and were 50% less like­ly to drop out.

Mes­sages to teach­ers were not as ef­fec­tive. They had no ef­fect on teacher at­ten­dance, but they still led them to at­tend more to stu­dents at the low end of the dis­tri­bu­tion of base­line test scores. As a re­sult, even though learn­ing did not sig­nif­i­cant­ly im­prove in this group, dropouts also de­creased by 50% rel­a­tive to the con­trol group.

In turn, stu­dents for whom both par­ents and teach­ers re­ceived mes­sages from the school ex­pe­ri­enced no im­prove­ments rel­a­tive to the con­trol group. In ef­fect, dropouts even in­creased in this group rel­a­tive to the con­trol group for stu­dents whose teach­ers were al­ready high­ly mo­ti­vat­ed at base­line.

All in all, our find­ings in­di­cate that ex­ter­nal pres­sure can help to im­prove teach­ers’ ef­fort and boost learn­ing in de­vel­op­ing coun­tries, but too much of it can back­fire. Sur­pris­ing­ly, back­fire is con­cen­trat­ed on the teach­ers who were al­ready mo­ti­vat­ed to start with, con­sis­tent with the idea that ex­trin­sic mo­ti­va­tion can crowd out in­trin­sic mo­ti­va­tion -- strik­ing­ly, even in the ab­sence of fi­nan­cial in­cen­tives.

The loop: chil­dren’s un­der-ed­u­ca­tion due to fac­tors such as lack of teacher mo­ti­va­tion

Break­ing the loop: mes­sages to mo­bi­lize par­ents to en­gage in their chil­dren’s school life in­di­rect­ly mo­ti­vate teach­ers to put in more ef­fort, lead­ing to bet­ter learn­ing out­comes and low­er dropouts

Re­search Team

Guilherme Lichand

UZH

More Infos

Dr. Sharon Wolf

Jacobs Foundation Research Fellow, Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania

Maite Deambrosi

UZH