Boosting Study Habits with High-Frequency Information: A Field Experiment to Aid Disadvantaged Students

Extended school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted students' study habits and routine educational engagement, specially in low-income settings where distance education often fails to reach disadvantaged populations. We use a field experiment in rural Bangladesh to determine whether increasing parental engagement can mitigate these disruptions, particularly in the post-pandemic recovery stage. Our findings reveal that a high-frequency information intervention-delivered through weekly text messages and automated voice calls-significantly increases parents' awareness and children's self-study hours, particularly in households lacking access to technology. By disseminating information on available learning resources, teachers' contact details, and the benefits of education, the intervention boosts daily self-study hours by 15 percent. Although Bangladesh's simplified post-pandemic school promotion and shortened syllabus constrained our ability to measure academic improvements, the intervention narrowed study-hour inequalities, promoting upward mobility (and reducing downward mobility) among households without technology access. Shapley-value decomposition analyses indicate that 5-20 percent of the reduced inequality is attributable to the direct treatment effect. Better parental involvement-encouraging children to use learning resources and more household investment in private tutoring-appears to be an important causal channel. Our findings underscore the potential of scalable, low-cost, parent-focused programs to bolster learning continuity under adverse conditions-particularly important for low- and middle-income countries.