Enabling adults with less education to support their child’s education through hyperlocal educational videos

Abstract

Parental engagement in their children’s education is known to be an important predictor of children’s academic success. However, adults with less education (ALEs) in developing countries face several challenges in supporting their children at home, particularly after the children reach middle school. This research aims to facilitate parental engagement through an intervention in the Indian context. We first conducted user studies with 113 ALE parents to understand the dynamics of parental engagement. We learned that though many ALE parents invest heavily from their limited resources so that they can send their children to paid tuition classes, otherwise they lack time, resources and self-efficacy to get better engaged with their children’s education. Based on these insights, and with the help of a school teacher, we came up with four hyper-local video prototypes - we call these “explainer video”, “guider video”, “discussion video” and “homework video”. We sent these videos over WhatsApp to 12 ALE parents in Pune, India and followed up with them for two weeks. We found that parents of “better-performing” students perceived the videos to be useful and tended to watch more videos whereas parents of “not-so-well-performing” students required additional mediation and triggers. An important learning was that interventions need to help parents and children develop an academic culture at home. Overall, these videos made parents aware about their children’s educational activities and helped them get better engaged with their education.