To help language skills of children, study finds, text their parents with tips (discusses research by Susanna Loeb and Ben York)

With research showing language gaps between the children of affluent parents and those from low-income families emerging at an early age, educators have puzzled over how best to reach parents and guide them to do things like read to their children and talk to them regularly.

A new study shows that mobile technology may offer a cheap and effective solution. The research, released by the National Bureau of Economic Research this month, found that preschoolers whose parents received text messages with brief tips on reading to their children or helping them sound out letters and words performed better on literacy tests than children whose parents did not receive such messages.

Pediatricians are now advising parents to read daily to their children from birth. Some communities are developing academic curriculums for home visitors to share with parents of babies and toddlers, while other groups are mounting public information campaigns for parents on the importance of talking, reading and singing.

But many of these efforts do not necessarily target parents at the moments when they are most likely to use the information.

“What’s really cool about this is that the messages reach parents at a time when they can act on them,” said Todd Rogers, an assistant professor of public policy at Harvard University, who was not involved in the research. “It’s not just about getting messages to parents, but giving them in a timely way to serve to remind parents of things they already know and already intend to do.”

The study’s authors, Benjamin N. York, a Stanford University doctoral student, and Susanna Loeb, a professor of education at Stanford, followed 440 families with 4-year-olds enrolled in public preschool in the San Francisco Unified School District last year. The vast majority of the parents had low incomes.

Read the full story in The New York Times.

Susanna Loeb is the Barnett Family Professor at Stanford Graduate School of Education and faculty director of the Center for Education Policy Analysis.