Light-touch design enhancements can boost parent engagement in math activities

Highlights

• Light touch enhancements promote parents’ involvement in children’s math programs.

• Math specific content promotes parents’ involvement in children’s math programs.

• Math-specific enhancements that encourage parents to participate in math workshops have small but positive effects on children’s math skills.

Abstract

Early proficiency in math skills is increasingly being seen as an independent area worthy of early curriculum development and policy investment to reduce socioeconomic disparities in children’s school readiness. However, scalable approaches for parents to support their children’s emerging math skills at home are limited. We examine how behavioral economics (BE)–informed enhancements to an existing play-based school readiness curriculum, Getting Ready for School, can promote parents’ involvement in mathematical activities with their children. The BE-informed enhancements included strategies specifically intended to normalize math and alleviate math anxiety by interweaving fundamental math components such as numbers, patterns, and shapes into daily parent–child interactions. The customized supplemental math content and images––delivered via text messages, along with personalized invitations to Getting Ready for School math workshops––increased family attendance at the math workshops. Math scores were higher among children in the GRS-BE math enhancement group but not statistically distinguishable from the comparison group when controlling for covariates.

Introduction

Math abilities exhibited as early as a child’s preschool years relate to children’s academic skills across various cognitive domains (Duncan et al., 2007, Feinstein and Bynner, 2004, Jordan et al., 2009, Phillips and Shonkoff, 2000). Emerging math skills are increasingly viewed as an independent area worthy of early curriculum development and policy investment to reduce socioeconomic disparities in children’s school readiness (Duncan et al., 2007, Huntsinger et al., 2016). Such scholarship responds to a well-documented line of research showing that families from low-income communities enter school behind their higher-income peers in math (e.g., Reardon & Portilla, 2016). To narrow these gaps, interventions have been designed to promote and reinforce the teaching of math concepts prior to formal school entry; these programs include Rightstart, Number Worlds, Building Blocks, and Big Math for Little Kids (Greenes et al., 2004, Griffin, 2004, Griffin et al., 1994, Sarama and Clements, 2004). The attention and investments directed toward teachers’ implementation of these programs are not matched by an equivalent focus on what parents can teach and reinforce outside school. With a few exceptions, cost-effective, scalable approaches to encourage parents to spend time on math activities are relatively underexplored and understudied. In particular, strategies are needed to complement school readiness curricula that normalize math activities and address misconceptions and anxieties about math content, which are hypothesized to hamper parent engagement. This study aims to help fill this gap.

Although the potential importance of math seems to be increasingly recognized in research and policy circles and in classroom curricula, parents report spending more time on literacy-related activities than on math-related activities on a weekly basis (Cannon & Ginsburg, 2008). This finding may in part be due to the fact that there are relatively fewer efforts to communicate with and educate parents about math, as compared to language and literacy. It may also be in part due to parents’ avoidance of math because of misconceptions about mathematics (e.g., math is abstract, difficult, and unrelated to everyday life) and parents’ anxiety about their own math abilities (e.g., “I’m bad at math and therefore can’t help my child with math homework”). Parent anxieties and misconceptions affect the quality and amount of time parents spend on math activities with their children, even in the context of information and education about the importance of math for children’s school readiness (e.g., Soni & Kumari, 2017). Failing to address such parent anxieties in the context of existing promising early childhood programming may have the unintended consequence of diluting the program’s impact on children’s math skills.

We apply insights from the interdisciplinary field of behavioral economics (BE)––which lies at the nexus of economics and social psychology––to guide ways in which strategies may be designed to facilitate parents’ engagement with early childhood programs and curricula. We pay particular attention to cognitive processes or biases that might interfere with engagement in math activities with children. Previous studies using these data collected in prior waves have shown a program impact on literacy, but not on math scores (Gennetian et al., 2019). These null findings motivated us to implement math-specific messages into the intervention. Here, we examine how BE enhancements affect preschool children’s math assessments. We specifically tested whether supplemental math-specific, BE-informed text message content and images, coupled with personalized invitations to math workshops, integrated into a broader preschool curriculum in New York City Head Start classrooms called Getting Ready for School (GRS) would increase parents’ attendance at math workshops and improve children’s math skills.