1 Student Feedback, Parent-Teacher Communication, and Academic

Student feedback, parent-teacher communication, and academic performance: Experimental evidence from rural China W Stanley Siebert Department of Business and Labour Economics, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom Xiangdong Wei Department of Economics, Lingnan University, Hong Kong SAR Ho Lun Wong Department of Economics, Lingnan University, Hong Kong SAR Xiang Zhou Department of Business and Labour Economics, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom Abstract This study reports a randomized controlled trial to improve teacher-student-parent feedback, conducted in a rural county in China with many left-behind children. Data are collected from over 4,000 primary schoolchildren (8 to 10 years old) over two school terms. We find that bi-weekly student feedbacks using our special scorecard of schoolwork and behavior improve mathematics results by 0.16 to 0.20 standard deviations, with 0.09 for language. Communicating these assessments also to parents produces further large mathematics benefits for young left-behind children, about 0.30 standard deviations. A low-cost investment in better feedback thus brings significant achievement gains especially for disadvantaged children. Keywords: Student assessment; Parent-teacher communication; Academic performance; Randomized controlled trial; Rural China Acknowledgement: We are grateful for the support from the General Research Fund of Research Grant Council in Hong Kong (Ref. No. d00971). We are also grateful for comments made by participants at the 2017 meetings of the Econometric Society in Asia, and the Asian and Australasian Society of Labor Economists. 1 Student feedback, parent-teacher communication, and academic performance: Experimental evidence from rural China 1. Introduction Our study reports on randomized controlled trials designed to improve teacher-student-parent communication, conducted in a rural county in China with many left-behind children. The communication is based on a specially designed feedback scorecard. Our scorecard follows the classic feedback formula (Hattie, 2012) of providing objective information on the student’s weekly academic progress and classroom behavior. At the same time, it is intended to be non- judgmental (Kluger and De Nisi, 1996) so that weaker students are not discouraged. In our first intervention, the results of our feedback form are discussed bi-weekly between teacher and student, and at the end of the year, we test for improvement in academic performance. In the second intervention, the results are also regularly shared with the parents, and again we test for improvement. Let us discuss these interventions. First, we put forward our regular teacher-student feedback as a simple pedagogical mechanism for improving teachings standards. Alternatives such as high dosage tutoring (see Fryer, 2014) are expensive, and our simple feedback approach is worth trying. Hattie’s (2012) well-known research, which examines 900 meta-analyses of what works best in education, gives feedback as one of the most potent influences. Effective feedback requires teacher judgment about a student’s performance gap: ‘‘Feedback is information about the gap between the actual level and the reference level of a system parameter, which is used to alter the gap in some way’’ (Ramaprasad, 1983, cited in William, 2011, p4). Such feedback can be minimal “verification” or more extensive “evaluative” (e.g., Butler et al., 2013), and it can be directed at the task, the process or the student’s “self” (Brown, 2012). The consensus developing is that more evaluative feedback is superior, with the UK’s Assessment Reform group advocating movement from 2 summative to formative assessment.1 However, feedback that is more extensive of course requires more teacher time and effort, and there is not enough of it. For example, Pianta et al.’s (2007) large US study based on the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development dataset reports a low rating on the quality of evaluative feedback: “teachers gave generic feedback on correctness rather than encouraging extension of student performance or discussing alternative solutions”. There is therefore a need to find more effective feedback methods, as in our simple scorecard approach. At the same time, it is accepted (William, 2011) that the feedback gap must be negative (performance below target) for some, which can actually reduce performance if these students become discouraged. Thus, Kluger and DeNisi’s (1996) well-cited analysis of feedback interventions found that while the average intervention had a large positive standard deviation effect size of 0.4, over one-third of the interventions actually decreased performance (see also Kosko and Miyazaki, 2012). In fact, while it is likely that students with high intrinsic motivation (i.e., more free time spent on the task – see Deci et al., 1999), or with high self-efficacy (Narciss, 2004) will face positive feedback gaps, raise their aspirations and move ahead, the converse may also be true. Moreover, research suggests (e.g. Hoover-Dempsey et al., 2001; Hill and Tyson, 2009) that student motivation and confidence are linked to parental support at home, e.g., with homework. Thus, we can expect the teacher-student feedback in our first intervention to work better for those living at home, and also with more educated or better-off parents who are more likely to provide the necessary support. This argument underlines the problem that negative feedback comments are more likely for the left-behind children whose baseline math and Chinese test scores tend to be below the rest. These students are then more likely to be discouraged and change or abandon the goal, which is a bad result of course. However, enlisting parental support by communicating feedback results to 1 There is also some US evidence (Hattie and Timperley, 2007, p100) that the better teachers, who are more “accomplished” on board certification assessments, use more feedback in the classroom. Also, Van Loon and Roebers’s (2017) study of Swiss 4th-6th graders finds specific feedback helpful in reducing student overconfidence, which helps performance. 3 them (our second intervention below) is likely “to make academic goals salient” for the learners (Hattie and Timperley, 2007, p104), resulting in higher achievement. We thus expect that our intervention based on regular feedback will be effective when presented to the average learner who receives positive or at least not too bad feedback scores. But our second intervention, which brings the parents in, will help particularly for the left-behind or poor children who tend to receive negative feedback. Our second intervention communicates the student’s feedback results to his/her parents, and can be seen as boosting parental education investments in the cognitive achievement production function (see Todd and Wolpin, 2003, and more recently Fredrikkson et al., 2016). In principle, parents and teachers should regularly communicate with each other to provide a supportive learning environment for schoolchildren (see e.g., Cunha and Heckman 2008l; Hill and Tyson, 2009; Cheung and Pomerantz, 2012). However adequate parent-teacher communication will be more difficult to achieve in poor communities where parents are less educated and informed about parenting techniques and child development (Kerr and Stattin, 2000; Bursztyn and Coffman, 2012). Furthermore, in China many parents need to work far from home and have to leave their children behind (see Wang and Mesman 2015 for a meta-analysis)2. Consequently, our intervention to share feedback results with parents should help the migrant parents most, since they face obstacles in productively investing in their children, for example, in monitoring homework (see Zhang et al 2014). In other words, we may have here another example of the empirical regularity noted by Fredrikkson et al. (2016), that the effect of education interventions is normally greatest for pupils from poorer families. In recent years, there have been several well-designed experimental studies examining the effects of different parent-teacher communication programs on children’s educational outcomes. 2 The phenomenon of large-scale worker migration and consequent left-behind children happens not only in China but also in many other developing countries, with negative impacts on the children (see Acosta (2011) on El Salvador, McKenzie and Rapoport (2011) on Mexico, and Cortes (2015) on the Philippines). 4 Avvisati et al. (2013) find that inviting parents in a deprived school district near Paris to attend three meetings with the school principal increases school-related parental care and induces positive behaviors and attitudes among Grade 6 students. Bergman (2015) finds that frequently informing parents in a low-income area of Los Angeles about their children’s assignment quality for six months reduces parents’ upwardly-biased belief about children’s effort in school, raises parental monitoring and involvement, and improves behaviors and test scores. Kraft and Dougherty (2013) find that giving parents daily phone calls and messages improves homework completion and class participation among students in a mandatory summer school in Boston. In a similar study, Kraft and Rogers (2014) also find that delivering one-sentence individualized messages weekly to parents reduces dropouts among high school students in a credit recovery program. Islam (2017) finds that regular face-to-face meetings between parents and teachers in remote communities in rural Bangladesh increases parental

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