Researchers and policymakers examining school choice often assume that parents have well-ordered and stable preferences when it comes to their most important decisions, including where to send their children for school. A common assumption is that parents will be able to make the “correct” choice as long as they have access to complete information through school finders or “school shopping websites” (e.g., Levin 2002). But preferences may be more malleable than many assume, and parents might be influenced by the intentional or unintentional decisions that designers make about how to present information—how much detail to include, what attributes to describe, how to format the data shown for each attribute, and how to sort the options.
In this session, participants will engage with the findings of a study examining how various information displays changed parents’ decisions about which school they’d prefer for their children, and in some cases also affected the extent to which parents could easily understand information about schools and have a satisfying experience using each school shopping website. After hearing about how design choices can meaningfully increase the weight parents place on academic quality when selecting a school (compared to other attributes, such as a school’s distance from home), attendees will examine their own school guides and unpack how relatively simple and inexpensive design choices can produce meaningful changes in how parents interpret, process and use information about schools.
To prepare for this session, please submit an example of a local school guide
here. This could be from a public agency, or a private resource like U.S. News & World Report.
