Parental Involvement in Education: Evidence from Field Experiments in Developing Countries

Greater parental involvement in their children’s studies has been shown to be effective even in disadvantaged communities in developed countries. Based on a study of randomized field experiments involving regular, face-to-face meetings between teachers and parents in a rural Bangladesh setting, we show that this finding can be extended also to developing countries. Regular parent–teacher meetings induced parents to spend more time assisting their children and monitoring their school work. Not only did this help to improve students’ test scores but it also resulted in improvements in student attitudes and behavior. The treatment effects were robust across parental, teacher or school-level characteristics. These findings have major policy implications for developing countries where higher school enrolment levels have often not translated into improved educational outcomes: programs to stimulate parent–teacher interactions are cost-effective, easy to implement and scale up.