Ubiquitous mobile educational data management by teachers, students and parents: Does technology change school-family communication and parental involvement?

Digital educational data management has become an integral part of school practices. Accessing school database by teachers, students, and parents from mobile devices promotes data-driven educational interactions based on real-time information. This paper analyses mobile access of educational database in a large sample of 429 schools during an entire academic year. Using learning analytics approach, the study compares students, their mothers’ and fathers’ mobile logins onto the database between schools with frequent, occasional, and no mobile (i.e., computer only) teacher access. In addition, this paper explores gender differences in parental involvement through mobile monitoring of their children’ function in school. The results supported both study hypotheses. (1) Mobile accessing of the database by teachers promoted mobile accessing of the database by their students, mothers, and fathers. It seems that ubiquitous mobile data management is a modeling process in which students and parents learn from teachers. (2) Compared to fathers, significantly more mothers used the mobile school database. Moreover, among parents-uses, mothers accessed educational data of their children significantly more frequently than fathers. The results suggest that mothers are still more actively involved than fathers in mobile monitoring of how their children function in school. The results are discussed in terms of School Community of Innovation model and technological determinism approach. © 2016, Springer Science+Business Media New York.