Supporting education in Ghana

As a Penn undergraduate, Sharon Wolf studied in Ghana for a semester before graduating in 2006 with a degree in psychology. Now an associate professor at the Graduate School of Education, Wolf is leading a research project on reaching parents in rural Ghana with supportive text messages to share information about helping their children, especially girls, continue and succeed in school.

Wolf is the architect and lead author of the pandemic-born study conducted from January to June last year. The team’s discoveries, some surprising, have implications for collecting data in remote and impoverished areas and for improving parental involvement in their children’s education.

“We learned a lot about how to do that in a way that builds trust and helps the participants feel engaged in the program,” says Wolf, who has been on GSE’s Human Development & Quantitative Methods Division faculty since 2016. “I think if we could do mobile phone interventions the right way, it's a chance to really reach and offer certain services to families who can’t access them otherwise.”

Read the full story at Penn Today.