Design Guidelines for Parent-School Technologies to Support the Ecology of Parental Engagement

Abstract

Parents' engagement in their children's education is key to children's academic success and social development. For many parents in the U.S., engagement is still a struggle partly due to a lack of communication and community-building tools that support the broader ecology of parenting, or parental ecology. Although current technologies have the potential to create opportunities to improve parental engagement, little is known about the impact of existing technology's design on the parental ecology. We present findings from 63 interviews with parents and an observation of existing technologies that support parent-school interactions. We found four critical issues that the design of current technologies need to address: (1) inflexibility in the boundaries of digital spaces, (2) inequality, (3) fragmentation and inconsistency of information, and (4) lack of relevant non-academic information. As a result, we propose design guidelines for technologies to support the parental ecology, and reflect on design issues that require further research.