Parents' use of technology to stay informed about their children's education

Amidst the backdrop of lackluster student achievement and a need for parents to understand how their children are doing in school, this paper presents data on the frequency of technology-enabled parent practices in the post-pandemic educational era. Using three years of randomly sampled parent survey data collected for a larger community broadband evaluation study, descriptive analyses and ordinal logistic regression explore the variety and frequency of parents' use of technology to connect with and support their children attending public school. Results showed consistently high levels of parent technology use for accessing information about student schoolwork and performance, as well as for communicating with school personnel. Examining several potential explanatory variables, little evidence was found that frequency of practice differed based on household characteristics or participation in the broadband program, although there were exceptions based on household socioeconomic status (SES) and race/ethnicity. Furthermore, parent technology use appeared to become more equitable over time; in 2023, differences between how often different groups of parents used digital devices to access information or communicate with their child's teacher appeared smaller than they did in the two years prior. In the context of increasing access to and investment in technological tools and infrastructure, these findings update and modernize the ongoing research literature addressing parent engagement.