Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

The emergence of communication platforms such as Facebook-like mobile applications (apps) presents new opportunities to more effectively connect schools with families given that access to smartphones is becoming near universal (Pew Research Center, 2018). Since 2010, a large marketplace has developed around these mobile-based apps. However, little is understood about who uses them, how they are used, and what their effects are on communication quality and students’ success in school.

In this paper, we examine usage patterns for a mobile-based communication app, SchoolCNXT, and the importance of user supports for maximizing its efficacy in a sample of 132 New York City (NYC) public schools. We randomly assign participating schools to receive intensive training and ongoing guidance on how to use the app such as in-person school visits by a SchoolCNXT coordinator, in-person and online training sessions tailored to individual school’s needs, regular personalized email communication with usage reports and tips, and individual and school-wide recognition incentives for active users. By only providing basic, technical support to control schools, we evaluate the effects of supplementing access to SchoolCNXT with intensive implementation supports on usage measures, perceptions about communication quality in schools, student achievement, and absenteeism.

We find that providing free access to SchoolCNXT and basic user supports to control schools resulted in low levels of adoption of the new technology. Only 44% of teachers and 13% of parents in the control group ever logged-in to the app to activate their accounts. Total usage rates were also low among the control group, with an average of 2.5 total incidents of usage (i.e. sending a message or posting, clicking on, liking, or saving a post in the app) during the academic year among teachers who activated their accounts.

We also find that intensive user supports increased teacher activation rates by 15%, and more than doubled overall use. However, these increases in adoption and use in treatment schools did not measurably improve overall perceptions about the quality of teacher-parent communication among administrators, teachers, or parents. Results from a matching analyses comparing all 132 schools that participated in the experiment to observably similar NYC schools reveal significant increases in teachers’ overall perceptions about communication quality caused by providing free access to SchoolCNXT with at least basic supports. However, we find no effects on parents’ perceptions of communication quality or on student outcomes. Internal app usage data from the following year reveals that, year-on-year, total use among teachers declined about 15% across all participating schools and remained relatively unchanged among parents.

Better understanding who adopts new mobile communication apps and how they use them can inform efforts to maximize the efficacy of these new communication platforms. Such continuous improvement efforts are critical given teacher-parent communication remains infrequent and unsystematic in most schools (Noel et al., 2016).