Parents work hard to make informed decisions about their children’s education. Whether evaluating school options, interpreting a test score, or monitoring their child’s safety at school, they consistently seek trustworthy information. However, the often inaccessible education research landscape represents a substantial challenge. Parents often need to synthesize data from multiple sources, each offering different levels of detail and relevance. This inaccessibility is especially difficult for parents making high-stakes decisions, including those navigating special education services or school choice.
Research consistently shows that when parents are involved in their children’s education, students achieve better academic outcomes, improved behaviors, and stronger social-emotional skills. However, parental involvement differs based on several factors, such as parents’ beliefs, children’s developmental stage, parent-teacher relationship, and economic factors. When information is hard to access, involvement becomes more difficult.
To gain initial insight into these dynamics, we conducted an exploratory inquiry that included a focused literature scan, informal conversations with a small group of parents, and a review of social listening tool data from online platforms, such as Reddit, blogs, and Nextdoor. Our aim was not to produce generalizable findings, but to gain a clearer sense of where parents turn for education research, how they use what they find, and what challenges they run into along the way.
From this early work, we garnered three takeaways to highlight opportunities for researchers and staff at education agencies (i.e., organizations that run and support schools, such as school districts, state education departments, and school offices) to better connect research with the education decisions parents make on behalf of their children. We pair each takeaway with a practical, research-informed recommendation.
Takeaway 1: Parents want data they can use to make informed decisions for their children.
Parents overwhelmingly value data: 90 percent report that basic educational data, such as grades and test scores, are essential for understanding their child’s progress and helping them do their best. At the same time, parents also look for additional types of data that offer a more complete view of their child’s educational experience, including data on:
- Opportunity to learn: Information about the supports, resources, and instructional practices that help a child meet their learning goals
- Access to high-quality education: Data on curricula, staff qualifications, available programs, enrichment opportunities, and access to technology
- School climate: Insights into students’ sense of belonging and safety, the school’s values, and the overall learning environment
Parents rarely rely on a single information source. Instead, they triangulate across sources and people. When information is inconsistent, they turn to their networks to help interpret what they’ve seen or read. This dependence on relational sense-making came through strongly in our conversations with parents. One parent shared, “I look online, I talk to friends, then I sit with it to figure out what aligns with our values and what the data actually tells me.”
Parents we spoke with also described “high-stakes decisions,” such as buying a home in a specific district before a child is even born. These decisions can shape a decade or more of a child’s schooling experience, yet parents often lack accessible, comprehensive data to guide them. Even after school selection, new decision points emerge at transition years, when developmental needs shift or family circumstances change. Parents need data to meet them at these critical decisions.
Recommendation 1: Provide decision-ready resources aligned to high-stakes parental decisions.
Researchers and education agency staff should recognize the full range of data parents seek and create resources designed for parents’ most likely—and most critical—moments of need. This includes developing decision-ready tools for:
- First educational experiences: Clear, comparable district- or school-level information for parents preparing for their child’s first educational experiences
- Key transition points: Guidance for moving from Pre-K to kindergarten, elementary to middle school, and middle to high school, backed by research that highlights what matters most at each stage
- Special education decisions: User-friendly summaries that explain rights, processes, and evidence-based supports
- Unplanned or mid-year decisions: Quick, accessible research explanations that help parents interpret information about school climate, instructional quality, or intervention options
Research products designed to accommodate these common decision points help parents access the right information at the right time, making evidence more actionable and meaningful in their daily lives.
Takeaway 2: Parents face barriers to accessing and using research.
Available research and our conversation with parents reveal that parents want to engage with education research, but several barriers limit how effectively they can access or interpret information.
Information overload and uncertainty. Parents feel overwhelmed by the amount of information available online and unsure where to find credible, relevant research. Our review of social listening data (e.g., social media and other online forums) on education-related topics showed that conversations varied widely. For example, conversations about choosing or changing schools included posts or comments about specific political candidates’ platforms related to school choice and school choice as a policy. In contrast, conversations about special education included both positive and negative interactions with specific schools. Researchers were rarely the dominant voice in these discussions, if they were present at all. In our informal conversations, parents who had research training reported relying on scholarly literature and evidence-based resources when making education decisions, while parents without this training expressed uncertainty about what counts as “research” or how to interpret findings.
Accessibility barriers. Time, language, internet access, work schedules, and feelings of exclusion from school communities all shape parents’ abilities to find and use research. These barriers disproportionately affect parents who have fewer resources or limited connections to schools. As one parent shared, “I want to make the best choices I can for my child, but there’s only so much time in the day. It helps when information is easy to find and understand.”
These challenges align with what the Dual Capacity-Building Framework for Family-School Partnerships emphasizes: For parents to meaningfully engage in their child’s education, they need both access to information and the confidence and skills to use it. Schools, in turn, need to communicate clearly, create welcoming environments, and partner with parents in ways that honor their experiences. Simply making research available is not enough: Parents benefit more when information is presented in formats that are understandable, relevant, and explicitly connected to children’s learning.
Recommendation 2: Increase parents’ access to research and build their capacity to use it.
Researchers and education agency staff should work together to make education research easier for parents to access, understand, and use. This means pairing clear information with support that builds parents’ confidence to engage with data. Practical steps include:
- Designing research products with accessibility in mind: Use plain language, offer translations, create mobile-friendly formats, and provide short audio or video versions.
- Offering simple guidance on how to use the information: Include examples of how to interpret data points, what they may mean for a child’s learning, and questions parents can ask during school conversations.
- Co-creating materials with parents: Engage parents early to ensure that resources reflect their experiences and contexts, and the decisions they face.
- Embedding research in everyday scenarios: Connect findings to specific moments—reviewing progress reports, preparing for parent-teacher conferences, or understanding school climate reports.
- Partnering with schools and districts: Integrate clear, digestible research summaries into existing communication channels, such as newsletters, portals, and school events.
By working together to increase access and build parents’ confidence, researchers and education agency staff can strengthen parents’ ability to use research in ways that support their children’s education.
Takeaway 3: Parents rely on peer networks and secondary sources to process what they learn.
While some parents may consult education-focused websites, such as school rating platforms or state report cards, many rely more heavily on relational and community-based sources to make sense of information. Friends, neighbors, and other parents provide the context and interpretation parents say they need to understand challenges, options, and next steps when making decisions. Several parents we spoke with emphasized how helpful it is to hear from others who have experienced similar situations.
Online communities are playing an increasingly central role in helping parents make decisions, as well. Every parent we spoke with mentioned using digital spaces such as parent subreddits, Facebook groups, or parenting blogs. These platforms are not simply supplemental: For many parents, they serve as primary sources of guidance. Large online communities, such as r/Parenting on Reddit with millions of members, demonstrate the scale of this information ecosystem. Search engines such as Google, which can include social components like ratings and reviews, also serve as sources of information.
This reliance on secondary and peer-driven sources presents a challenge for researchers. Education research often reaches parents only after being filtered through personal networks, influencers, or online communities. Since parents’ beliefs are shaped first by trusted relationships and only later by formal research, the information they receive may be incomplete, inconsistent, or disconnected from the original evidence.
Recommendation 3: Reach parents through the networks they already trust.
Researchers and education agency staff should actively engage with spaces where parents already seek and share information. Because parents often rely on peer networks and online communities, research will likely have greater reach and relevance when it is embedded in these channels. Practical steps include:
- Partnering with parent-facing content creators: Collaborate with parenting bloggers, newsletter writers, or podcast hosts who routinely distill information for parents.
- Engaging in online communities thoughtfully: Participate in relevant Reddit threads, Facebook groups, or community forums with verified researcher accounts that offer clear, trustworthy explanations of evidence.
- Creating content built for sharing: Develop infographics, short videos, carousel posts, and other modular formats that parents can easily repost in their networks.
- Creating content that is “findable”: Use language that matches how people might search for information, including voice search and AI.
- Working with community organizations: Equip libraries, family resource centers, after-school programs, and local nonprofits with accessible summaries of research they can share with parents.
- Developing “research ambassadors”: Identify parents or community leaders who can help translate and contextualize research within their existing networks.
By extending research into channels parents already trust, researchers and education agency staff can reduce the distance between research and parents’ everyday decisions.
Conclusion
Parents already work hard to make informed decisions about their children’s education and rely on many different sources to do so. By making research more accessible, timely, and present in the spaces to which parents already turn for information, researchers and education agency staff can help ensure that research is both usable and meaningful in parents’ daily lives. Supporting parents in this way strengthens their ability to advocate for their children and deepens the connection between research and practice.
Methods
This exploratory study used three primary approaches to understand how parents seek and use education research.
Literature scan. We conducted a targeted review of peer-reviewed studies and gray literature (i.e., research and reports shared outside academic journals) related to parent information-seeking, research use, and education-related decision-making. The scan focused on identifying patterns in how families engage with data, the types of information they prioritize, and the barriers they commonly face.
Informal conversations. We had informal conversations with nine parents identified through convenience sampling. Parents varied in educational background, geographic location, professional experiences, and ages of children. Because this was an exploratory effort, the sample is not intended to be representative. Instead, the conversations provided early insight into how parents define trustworthy information, the challenges they encounter when accessing research, and the strategies they use to make educational decisions.
Social listening tools. We used the listening tool Agorapulse to follow education-related conversations from September to November 2025. We used search terms such as ‘school choice,’ ‘pick school,’ ‘school recommendations,’ ‘special education,’ ‘special needs,’ ‘disability and student,’ ‘school safety,’ ‘school environment,’ and ‘school climate.’ Agorapulse scanned Reddit and blogs for mentions of these topics. We also used these search terms on platforms such as Nextdoor. Similar to our conversations with parents, these social listening efforts were intended as a cursory exploration into the types of information parents seek.
Together, these methods offered an initial view into parents’ experiences with education research and helped surface themes that warrant deeper investigation in future work.
Suggested citation
Reyes, O., Holquist, S.E., Garcia, K., Guros, C., & Kelley, C. (2026). Clear, accessible education research can help parents make informed decisions. Child Trends. DOI: 10.56417/3260a4858z