Using Design-Based Research for a Technological Intervention to Promote Parental Involvement in Kindergarten

Parental involvement in preschool education is widely recognized as an important factor in skills development, school outcomes and lifelong success, and can be promoted through digital technologies, which offer new forms of communication and collaboration between parents and educators, and new learning opportunities for children. This research aimed to develop and test a digital platform with communication and content sharing functionalities between parents and educators, and to assess the impact of using the platform in three participating institutions. The research question guiding the efforts was: what features and contents should a multimedia platform have to promote parental involvement in the learning of children who attend kindergarten? The research was developed according to a design-based research methodology, and the parents and educators were involved in all phases of the process: preliminary study, development and evaluation. The results showed that the sharing of activities carried out with children in kindergarten and a private messaging service were the most valued functionalities. Regarding local impact, different results were obtained in each kindergarten, related to the roles assumed by the users within the platform, and previous practices of using technologies for parental involvement.