The newest issue of the Journal of College Access has some great research that NCAN members should take a dive into. Two articles in particular focus on text messaging as a strategy for college advising.
The articles find that texting is most effective when it assists students with accomplishing specific, concrete tasks or milestones.
The two articles, “Inside the Black Box of Text-Message College Advising” and “The Student Experience of Two-Way Text-Message College Advising: A First Glimpse”,
examine data from the Digital Messaging to Improve College Enrollment and Success (DIMES) project, a large-scale randomized controlled trial that involved 75,000 college-intending students. The first report mines data from students’ text responses
with college advisers, while the second examines data from qualitative focus groups and students’ responses to program evaluation-focused research questions.
Taken as a pair, the studies try to understand when texting is most effective. This is important because “as a group, the remote large-scale advising interventions reported to date have not demonstrated statistically significant differences between treatment
and control groups in overall measures of college enrollment” (Arnold, Owen, & Lewis). In other words, although college access programs operating locally have reported success with texting, when that strategy is taken to scale, that success dissipates.
“Inside the Black Box” is particularly useful because it breaks down the DIMES texting campaign into 18 separate phases and then reports on the kinds of responses students sent (categorized by content) in each phase. This could be helpful for programs
planning their own texting campaigns.
“The Student Experience” finds that students who engaged with the text messaging intervention largely found it helpful (79% rated it a 4 or 5 on a 5-point scale), and 92% would recommend it to a future group of seniors.
Students who didn’t engage offered a number of reasons for not doing so. These included having the wrong contact information, not understanding there was an actual person on the other end of the text, receiving help from elsewhere, or having forgotten
they signed up for the service in the first place.
The authors of “The Student Experience” ultimately conclude in part “our findings raise the hypothesis that text messaging is best suited to providing information and assistance focused on financial aid and other topics requiring specific information
and concrete tasks.”
These studies are valuable for the insight they shine on text messaging as a strategy. Programs employing this strategy would do well to read the findings and discussion sections in both reports.
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