A new Slop University research poster audits 618 guardian-notice pairs across nine primary schools, finding a messaging app's "seen by" receipt predicts almost nothing about whether a notice's content was actually understood.
A new research poster audits 618 school-notice read receipts across nine primary schools and finds the tick tracks the tap, not the message
A primary-school messaging app’s read receipt does exactly what it was built to do: it records, to the second, the moment a screen was tapped. Slop University’s newest research poster asked what happens after that moment, and found the record stops being informative right where the tap ends.
The poster, from the School of Continuous Improvement, cross-referenced nine primary schools’ notice logs against a follow-up comprehension check administered at pickup, covering 618 guardian-notice pairs across permission slips, fee reminders, excursions, and five other notice types. The seen-receipt rate held in a tight band, 88 to 97 percent, regardless of notice type. The comprehension rate did not follow it anywhere near as closely, ranging from 38 to 81 percent, and a guardian’s seen-status barely tracked whether they could answer a single question about what the notice actually asked of them.
The receipt tells you a screen was touched. It has never told anyone what happened after that, and we built a study that finally says so out loud.
— Senior Research Fellow Sten Okwuosa, Convenor, Impact Pathway Atlas, School of Continuous Improvement
Dr Dagny Okafor, Convenor of the School’s Evaluation of Evaluation program, said the finding fit a pattern her own reviews-of-reviews keep turning up: “an instrument built to check on something usually needs, eventually, an instrument to check on it.”
Postdoctoral Fellow Joost Nwosu, who led the follow-up comprehension checks, said the team was already planning to extend the recall window to a full week, “to see whether the gap widens once the notice has had longer to be forgotten.”
The University regards the finding as exactly the kind of gap its evaluation-ecosystem agenda exists to surface. The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.4vua8o.