By Ruoyu Lian, Johns Hopkins University

The use of parental text messaging to positively influence children’s educational behaviors has gained popularity. A recent study conducted by Catherine and colleagues hypothesized that a text message intervention using the MORE@Home app would be beneficial to enhancing parents’ engagement, and the specific content of text messages could affect students’ academic behaviors. Three components were examined: personalization of messages; reading view differences; and the use of goal setting.

The research design tested each possible combination of the intervention components by involving 5172 second and third-grade students (4993 families) and their parents from thirty elementary schools in the research study. The results from the study showed that personalized messages were more effective than non-personalized messages (ES = +0.08, p < 0.05), spending an extra 1.6 minutes using the app (ES = +0.11, p < 0.01), and completing 0.7 books (ES = +0.12, p < 0.01)…