School leaders, teachers, and state policymakers all work to provide information to parents about the quality of education in their schools and about their own children’s academic performance. How do parents receive and—if needed—act on the information provided? A new working paper creates an experimental methodology to examine how motivated parents are by various types of academic performance information, including a unique effort to reveal how parents respond when test scores and report cards send conflicting signals.
Researchers Derek Rury from Oregon State University and Ariel Kalil from the University of Chicago used the online survey platform Prolific to recruit parents from across the United States. All individuals who signed the consent form and completed the survey were paid a small stipend, but initial questions were designed to weed out anyone who was not currently the parent or guardian of one or more K–12 students. The majority of parent survey completers (n=2,078) were White (68 percent), followed by 18 percent Black, 7 percent Hispanic, and 2 percent Asian. Nearly 70 percent were mothers. The average age of parents was 41, and the average age of their oldest child was 17. Just over half of parents had completed a college degree and almost 42 percent reported household incomes below $60,000 annually.
The full survey focused on a hypothetical fifth grader who was “enrolled in a school similar to the participant’s own” and who had a specific letter grade in class, score on a standardized test (from 1 to 99), and percentile rank (10, 30, 50, 70, and 90) compared to a nationwide sample of fifth graders. Each survey respondent received a randomized set of data for a child and was asked to offer advice on how much time and money the family of this child should invest in their child’s academic progress based on the academic data provided. The child’s name was also randomly altered to indicate a boy or a girl for different survey completers. The dataset ultimately included more than 23,300 individual investment decisions.
Finally, participants were asked a series of questions regarding their feelings toward grades and standardized tests, designed to reveal whether parents viewed tests as biased against certain groups, whether they felt like a bad parent if their child earned poor grades or test scores, whether they believed parental investments pay off more if the child is already a good student, and so on. Researchers also asked parents how much they valued both grades and tests when making such investment decisions for their own child.
On average, participants recommended that parents invest about $43 per week and a little over four hours a day on their child’s academic progress. But Rury and Kalil found that survey respondents recommended stronger compensatory strategies—more investment to support the child—when either test scores or class grades indicated poor student performance. On average, a one-unit decrease in grades (e.g., from B to C) increased recommended investment by 0.14 standard deviations; a one-unit decrease in test score percentile category increased investment by 0.12 standard deviations. They also found clear evidence that parents placed more weight on grades than test scores when making investment recommendations. That is, the signal to invest was stronger for low grades than for low test scores.
And when the signals are mixed? In scenarios where grades were high but test scores were low, respondents did not recommend investing time or money. In scenarios where grades were low but test scores were high, they did recommend investing, consistent with the non-mixed signals responses. In short: The positive signal of high grades appeared to override the danger signal of low test scores. These findings cut across income, parental-education, and race/ethnicity categories, although Hispanic parents exhibit particularly pronounced grade-weighting. The findings also echo those established by Learning Heroes, whose survey and focus group studies have been sounding similar alarms for years.
The mechanisms at work in Rury and Kalil’s results aren’t immediately apparent, with the researchers’ best guess centered on interaction between the common belief (40 percent of respondents) that standardized tests are biased against “certain groups,” the fact that more respondents reported feeling distressed over their own child’s poor grades than over their poor test results, the high number (almost 30 percent) of respondents who said test scores were a reflection of family income, and several other widely-held beliefs captured in the data. They recommend that future research dives deeper into the specifics of these anti-test biases.
In conclusion, Rury and Kalil sound the alarm that their findings, coupled with rampant grade inflation, indicate parents are not receiving accurate information about how their children are really doing in school. From the parent perspective, this could lead to underinvestment in a child’s academic needs. And from the educator sector perspective, students will get less help at home unless grades and test scores start to match up—and tell the truth. From the policy perspective, it all sounds like a recipe for continued academic malaise.
SOURCE: Derek Rury and Ariel Kalil, “Interpreting Performance: Evidence on Signal Weighting in Human Capital Investment,” University of Chicago, Becker Friedman Institute for Economics (February 2026).
