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

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