The Added Value of Learning Activities at Home During the Preschool Year

• In Event: 1-013 - Family Engagement in Early Childhood: New Findings Across Developmental Periods, Intervention Types, and Ecological Settings

Integrative Statement

Parents across socioeconomic (SES) backgrounds are engaging with their preschoolers in at-home learning activities (e.g., reading, early numeracy activities) at higher levels than ever before (Bassok et al., 2016). Yet, little is known about whether parents typically engage in activities that support children’s unconstrained skills (e.g., vocabulary, problem solving) or more narrow, constrained skills (e.g., letter knowledge, counting; Snow & Matthews, 2016), and how those practices vary by family SES. It is also unclear whether there is added-value for these practices in supporting diverse children’s academic development, over and above enrollment in a preschool program that targets math and language skills. In this paper, we address these gaps by describing the extent to which lower- vs. higher-SES parents of preschool students engage in home-based learning activities conceptualized as supporting constrained vs. unconstrained skills. We then examine whether these conceptualizations differentially predict gains in children’s receptive language and math skills across the preschool year, and consider variation in those associations by family SES.

The study sample consists of N = 307 students attending the Boston Public Schools (BPS) preschool program during the 2016-2017 year and their parents. The program is free and open to any age-eligible child in the city. Students were enrolled in 41 classrooms, spread across 20 schools. Sample classrooms used language-, literacy-, and math-focused curricula. Study participants were diverse in their background characteristics (Table 1). Parents completed a survey in fall 2016 covering demographics, pre-BPS care settings, experiential learning activities outside the home, and home literacy, language, and math practices. Trained research staff assessed students on language and math skills in the fall and spring of preschool, using the PPVT, Woodcock Johnson Applied Problems, and Research-based Early Math Assessment.

We first conducted psychometric analyses to create constructs made up of unconstrained language and math practices and constrained literacy and math practices. We then conducted analyses to verify the validity of our constructs and fit multi-level models with random school effects, controlling for key covariates and pretest scores to examine whether these constructs predicted children’s language and math skill gains in prekindergarten and how associations varied by SES.

Results revealed high levels of internal consistency for home-based learning constructs and moderate correlations between constructs. Overall, parents reported engaging in unconstrained math activities at home least often and unconstrained language skills most often (Table 2). The lowest income parents engaged in math practices most often while the highest income parents engaged in unconstrained language practices most often (Table 2).
Similarly, the most educated parents reported the most frequent use of unconstrained language practices while the least educated parents engaged in unconstrained math practices most often (Table 2). While math and literacy practices were not predictive of child gains, home unconstrained language practices were predictive of language gains (Table 3).

Parent engagement in preschool is a major policy/practice focus. Our paper will provide specific insight into the activity types diverse families engage in and whether efforts to enhance specific activities are likely to support diverse children’s academic gains, as typically hypothesized.

Authors

• Meghan McCormick, MDRC
  Presenting Author

• Amanda Ketner, University of Michigan
  Non-Presenting Author

• Christina Weiland, University of Michigan
  Non-Presenting Author

• JoAnn Hsueh, MDRC
  Non-Presenting Author

• Catherine Snow, Harvard University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jason Sachs, Boston Public Schools
  Non-Presenting Author