Math is for Girls: The Unequal Effects of Text-Messaging to Help Parents Support Early Math Development

• In Event: Leveraging Behavioral Insights to Empower Parents to Support Young Children’s Development: Evidence from Experimental Interventions

Abstract

Math education has been in the forefront of education policy discussions for over two decades. Interest in math by politicians, policymakers, researchers, and practitioners stems, in part, from the understanding that the economy will depend on jobs in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (Clements, 2004). While math is increasingly taught in formal early childhood education settings, young children’s exposure to math is less prevalent at home. Though parents endorse the notion of supporting math concepts, they tend to focus more on literacy, with some evidence that this preference for literacy is greater in low-income, black, and Hispanic families (Sonnenschein, Metzger, and Thompson, 2016). These differences in early home experiences contribute to the achievement gap which affects later-life outcomes.

We fielded a randomized control trial to estimate the effects of 32-week, parent-facing text-message curricula on pre-kindergarten math achievement. The text-messaging program provides parents with small, easy-to-implement activities that leverage everyday routines and household materials. The program is designed to combat common barriers to behavior change identified in behavioral economics. The intervention tests a pure math program and the combination program. Both programs follow a “FACT”, “TIP”, and “GROWTH” approach to provide information and alleviate behavioral barriers to parenting. On Mondays, parents receive a “FACT” message with general information about a skill. On Wednesday, parents receive a “TIP” message that follows up with examples of fun and easy-to-implement activities supporting child development. On Fridays, parents receive a “GROWTH” message, which provides encouragement and another activity. The pure math program focuses exclusively on building math related skills. The combination program also covers literacy and social-emotional learning (SEL). Thus, we assigned parents into three equal-sized groups: one group received the pure math program, another the combination program, and the last a placebo program that did not provide information on child development or parenting practices.

Table 1 shows that overall, neither the combination program nor the pure math program had a significant effect on math scores, as measured by the Tools for Early Assessment in Math (TEAM). However, the combination program increased girls’ assessment scores by 0.156 standard deviations (p<0.10). The pure math program, in contrast, had no significant effect on either girls or boys. To understand how program effects varied by student ability and gender, we employ quantile regressions. In order to analyze quantile effects of boys and girls on a common distribution we use translated quantile effects (Bitler, Hoynes, and Domina, 2014) and use the math score distribution of the control group as reference distribution. Figure 1 shows that the effects of the program are concentrated on girls between the 18th and 57th percentile of the reference distribution (p<0.05).

We hypothesize that parents may differentially operationalize the texts due to differences in their perceptions of the academic ability by child gender (Baroody and Diamond, 2013) or that children may also differently react to the activities, possibly due to differences in executive functions such as self-regulation (Matthews, Ponitz, and Morrison, 2009).
 

Authors

• Christopher Doss, RAND Corporation
  Presenting Author

• Hans Fricke, Amazon
  Non-Presenting Author

• Susanna Loeb, Annenberg Institute at Brown University
  Non-Presenting Author