Increasing Parents' Engagement on Ed-Tech Platforms: Evidence from the Field

56 Pages Posted: 8 Aug 2024

See all articles by Nishit Goyal

Nishit Goyal

Independent

Alex Akira Okuno

New York University (NYU) - Leonard N. Stern School of Business

Divya Singhvi

New York University (NYU) - Leonard N. Stern School of Business

Somya Singhvi

USC Marshall School of Business

Date Written: August 06, 2024

Abstract

Ensuring universal access to quality education remains a formidable challenge in developing countries. A key issue affecting educational outcomes among low-income households is limited parental involvement in their children's education. EdTech platforms can help build cost-effective and impactful solutions to address this problem. In collaboration with Rocket Learning, one of India's leading non-profit EdTech organizations, we design, implement, and optimize nudges to increase parent engagement in digital educational communities. We conduct a large-scale Randomized Control Trial (RCT) with nearly 154,000 parents to investigate the effectiveness of peer comparison and self-comparison nudges in improving engagement. Our results demonstrate that nudges can significantly increase the number of engaged users by 8% to 13.5%. We find heterogeneous effects influenced by teachers' activity levels, parents' pre-treatment engagement, and potential benefits from targeted nudging. Leveraging RCT data, we develop machine learning-based targeting policies to optimize nudge assignments. A second RCT with 122,000 parents reveals that while targeted nudging performs comparably to the best uniform policy on average, it identifies a substantial sub-population (8.8% of parents) for whom targeted nudges improve engagement by 5.4% over the uniform policy. These findings have significant implications for policymakers and non-profits focused on improving educational outcomes in Low and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs), demonstrating the effectiveness of nudges in increasing parental engagement, revealing significant heterogeneity in their impact, and highlighting the nuanced benefits and challenges of ML-based targeting strategies in educational interventions.

Keywords: nudges, early childhood education, field experiment, developing countries, socially responsible operations, behavioral operations

Suggested Citation

Goyal, Nishit and Okuno, Alex Akira and Singhvi, Divya and Singhvi, Somya, Increasing Parents' Engagement on Ed-Tech Platforms: Evidence from the Field (August 06, 2024). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4918175

Nishit Goyal

Independent ( email )

Alex Akira Okuno

New York University (NYU) - Leonard N. Stern School of Business ( email )

Divya Singhvi (Contact Author)

New York University (NYU) - Leonard N. Stern School of Business ( email )

44 West 4th Street
Suite 9-160
New York, NY NY 10012
United States

Somya Singhvi

USC Marshall School of Business ( email )

701 Exposition Blvd
Los Angeles, CA
United States

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