This past week I read an interesting article on truancy notifications, where the authors modified the notification that gets sent out to parents to target four known behavioral barriers to parental engagement—all of which seem important to consider for school leaders:
1. Limited attention: parents are busy and often inundated with information on their child's schooling. Of course, the more complicated the messaging, the more difficult it will be for parents to process it. As a result, parents are often selective about which messages they choose to pay attention to and which to ignore.
2. Low literacy: a recent international assessment of adult (age: 16-65) literacy suggests that about 1 in 5 adults in the United States do not have the English literacy skills sufficient to complete tasks that require comparing and contrasting information, paraphrasing, or making low-level inferences. An earlier study suggests that over 40% of U.S. adults have a 6th- to 8th-grade reading level. It's also important to recognize that these rates of literacy may vary widely depending on community context (e.g., levels of non-native English speakers). Messages that are more complex and/or filled with school-specific jargon increase the chance that parents will disregard or misinterpret the message.
3. Self-efficacy: parents need to feel like their actions matter, and schools can play a critical role in making them feel like they can help their students succeed. Research finds that minority parents, in particular, are intimated by school staff and the institutional structure of schools. Parents need to believe that their actions will matter in the education of their child.
4. Biased beliefs: this finding astounded me—"Nearly 90% of parents believe their child’s achievement is at or above grade level, despite data showing that only one third of children actually perform at that level (Learning Heroes, 2018)" (p. 443). With respect to absences, parents also underestimate how many their child has and how impactful absences can be on their child's academic performance.
From their randomized experiment, the authors found that it wasn't a single intervention, but rather a combination of interventions that produced a reduction in student absences. Specifically, "modified truancy notifications that used simplified language (1 & 2), emphasized parental efficacy (3), and highlighted the negative incremental effects of missing school (4) reduced absences by 0.07 days in the 1 month following compared to the standard, legalistic, and punitively worded notification—an estimated 40% improvement over the standard truancy notification" (p. 442).