Is This Technology Useless? How Seemingly Irrelevant Factors Affect Adoption and Efficacy

Abstract

We conduct a field experiment to understand how the strategies organizations use to implement new technologies affect their adoption and efficacy. Specifically, we show that the standard strategy schools use to introduce a text message alert system for parents — online signup — induces negligible adoption. Simplifying the enrollment process by allowing parents to enroll via text messages modestly increases adoption — especially among parents of higher-performing students. Automatically enrolling parents dramatically increases adoption since very few parents opt out. The standard and simplified implementations generate no detectable increases in student performance. However, automatically enrolling parents meaningfully increases GPA and reduces student course failures. Simple changes to the implementation of new technologies can lead to radically different conclusions about whether new technologies are valuable and their ability to close achievement gaps.