Increasing Take-Up of Literacy Tutoring: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment

November 2026

Government programs often experience low take-up, limiting their potential positive impact. We examine whether reducing registration frictions can increase participation in a state-financed literacy intervention program. In a randomized field experiment, families received either encouragement and a simplified enrollment process, or these interventions plus text message nudges, relative to a business-as-usual control group. We find that encouragement and simplified registration increased take-up by more than 10 percentage points, while a fuller treatment of encouragement, simplified enrollment, and text nudges increased take-up by 6 percentage points. We also estimate the impact of these treatments to promote use of funding and amount of funding used to access tutoring. We find positive intent-to-treat effects with the fuller treatment showing a strong impact on use and amount of funding used. These low-cost interventions offer a promising strategy for increasing participation in government programs.

Keywords

literacy, tutoring, take-up, nudge, behavioral economics, encouragement, regulatory friction, parental engagement, choice, implementation

Education level

K-12 Education

Topics

Out-of-School and Alternative Education