Nudging Parents to Improve Preschool Attendance in Uruguay

Abstract

Uruguay has increased it preschool enrollment, reaching almost universal coverage among four- and five-year-olds. However, more than a third of children enrolled in preschool programs have insufficient attendance, with absenteeism higher in schools in lower socioeconomic areas and among younger preschool children. This paper presents the results of a behavioral intervention to increase preschool attendance nationwide. Most previous experiments using behavioral sciences have looked at the impact of nudging parents on attendance and learning for school-age children; this is the first experiment looking at both attendance and child development for preschool children. It is also the first behavioral intervention to use a government mobile app to send messages to parents of preschool children. The intervention had no average treatment effect on attendance, but results ranged widely across groups. Attendance by children in the 25th 75th percentiles of absenteeism rose by 0.320.68 days over the course of the 13-week intervention, and attendance among children in remote areas increased by 1.48 days. Among all children in the study, the intervention also increased language development by 0.10 standard deviations, an impact similar to that of very labor-intensive programs, such as home visits. The intervention had stronger effects on children in the remote provinces of Uruguay, increasing various domains of child development by about 0.33 to 0.37 standard deviations. Behavioral interventions seeking to reduce absenteeism and raise test scores usually nudge parents on both the importance of attendance and ways to improve child development. In this experiment, the nudges focused only on absenteeism but had an effect on both.

The Unlearning of School Attendance: Ideas for Change

“…The magnitude of absences and chronic absenteeism across all schools (Comparison Schools, UBC Schools that did not prioritize attendance, and UBC Schools that prioritized assistance) indicates that this problem is widespread and enduring. These findings are consistent with one study from Uruguay that reported that one third of children enrolled in preschool were absent for more than 15% of school days (Díaz et al, 2020). Data from around the world about daily attendance by preschoolers is scant (most studies have focused on preschool attendance as a binary variable, more reflective of preschool access and uptake; Gong et al, 2015;Boo, 2016;Delprato et al, 2016;Woldehanna, 2016;Sun et al, 2018;Su et al, 2020).…”

“…Text-based interventions have been shown to reduce chronic absenteeism from 63 to 55.3% of children enrolled in Head Start classrooms in Chicago (Kalil et al, 2021), and from 26 to 13% of children enrolled in kindergarten in Pittsburgh (Smythe-Leistico and Page, 2018). A text-based intervention for parents of children enrolled in prekindergarten and kindergarten in Uruguay increased attendance by 0.32-0.68 days over the 13-week period among children whose baseline attendance was in the 25th, 50th and 75th quantiles (Díaz et al, 2020). A mail-based intervention decreased chronic absenteeism from 5.5 to 4.6% of children in 10 preschools in California (Robinson et al, 2018).…”

“…Decades of research across multiple disciplines illustrate the importance of school attendance and describe associations between absenteeism and poor child outcomes, including cognitive, academic, behavioral, health, judicial and economic outcomes (Monk and Ibrahim, 1984;Hibbett and Fogelman, 1990;Levine, 1992;Wang et al, 2005;Henry et al, 2012;Marchbanks III et al, 2014;Monahan et al, 2014;Latif et al, 2015;Lansford et al, 2016;Rocque et al, 2017;. The prevalence of absenteeism varies predictably by age and grade Díaz et al, 2020). Absenteeism in preschool is often high and can reduce the effects of early education and reduce the return on investments in it Ehrlich et al, 2014).…”

“…Solutions have traditionally focused on student, family, school and community-level interventions separately, rather than in a systemic, coordinated manner (Eklund et al, 2022;. Most studies examine single intervention strategies, for example, text-based and mail-based interventions to motivate parents to improve their child's attendance (Robinson et al, 2018;Díaz et al, 2020;Kalil et al, 2021) or interventions addressing specific child health problems, like asthma (Guevara et al, 2003;Clark et al, 2004;Kim et al, 2020). A recent metaanalysis of 17 studies of evidence-based interventions targeting absenteeism within pre-K-12 public schools in the United States showed positive yet small effects [g = 0.25 (95% CI, 0.14-0.36)].…”

Hybrid parental training to foster play-based early childhood development: experimental evidence from Mexico

“…Play varies widely across and within cultures as a result of differences in childrearing beliefs, values, and practices, including the types of social interactions experienced during play, the resources used for playing, and the relation play has to other everyday activities; this necessarily has an impact on the quality and quantity of play (Gaskins, Haight, and Lancy, 2017). Parents with lower resources often miss opportunities to play a role as active agents in their child's development and learning because poverty can drain their cognitive resources and because their decisions may be tied to cognitive biases, such as limited attention and "present bias" (Gennetian, Darling, and Aber, 2016;Mateo-Berganza et al, 2020). That is, income instability and scarce resources may cause parents to discount future losses compared with present needs.…”