Does parent-child math engagement add up? A home numeracy intervention for parents of preschool children

• In Event: 1-081 - Moving the needle on the home numeracy environment: Low-cost, feasible interventions to enhance child outcomes

Integrative Statement

Early numeracy skills are related to children’s later mathematics and reading skills. Early interventions that target parent-child numeracy practices may be an effective way to promote these skills in young children. The aim of the current study was to evaluate the effectiveness of a home numeracy environment (HNE) intervention in increasing preschool children’s early numeracy skills through a randomized controlled trial.

The intervention was designed to incorporate practices that have been shown to improve children’s numeracy development, in addition to a number of practices that have been shown to lead to effective outcomes for parenting interventions more broadly. The intervention targeted four specific aspects of the HNE: parents’ beliefs of the importance of math, parent-child engagement in numeracy activities, parents’ self-efficacy for teaching math, and math resources. Parents attended a brief informational meeting and then received daily text messages for four weeks. It was hypothesized that, at posttest and compared to the counterfactual condition, parents who participated in the intervention would: 1) report numeracy development to be more important, 2) report greater self-efficacy for teaching math, and 3) report more frequent engagement in both direct and indirect HNE activities. Additionally, it was hypothesized that children whose parents participated in the intervention would outperform the counterfactual condition on an assessment of numeracy, but not literacy.

Participants were 42 parent-child dyads. Children were 3 or 4 years old (M = 3.90, SD = 0.55). Parents were randomly assigned to participate in either the HNE intervention or an active control condition. Both groups of parents attended a brief informational meeting and received daily text messages for four weeks; parents in the intervention group received information about the importance of early mathematics development and strategies for incorporating numeracy into their children’s daily routines and parents in the active control condition received information on general development in preschool. Before and after the intervention, parents completed a questionnaire on their beliefs of the importance of numeracy development, self-efficacy for teaching math, and engagement in direct and indirect HNE practices. Children were directly assessed on their early numeracy and literacy skills.

See Figure 1 for effect sizes comparing intervention and control groups for key outcomes. Findings indicate that, compared to parents in the counterfactual condition, parents who participated in the intervention reported more frequent direct HNE activities (Hedge’s g = 0.25) and their children showed greater improvement on numeracy skills (Hedge’s g = 0.38), but not literacy skills (Hedge’s g = -0.10). There were no group differences on beliefs of importance of math (Hedge’s g = 0.06), self-efficacy for teaching math (Hedge’s g = 0.10), or engagement in indirect HNE practices (Hedge’s g = 0.18). The study provides initial evidence that a brief HNE intervention is feasible for parents to implement and is effective in improving preschool children’s numeracy skills. Additionally, it demonstrates the potential for text messaging to be an effective method of delivering parenting interventions.

Authors

• Amy R. Napoli, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
  Presenting Author

• David Purpura, Purdue University
  Non-Presenting Author