Recipient Organization
PURDUE UNIVERSITY
(N/A)
WEST LAFAYETTE,IN 47907
Performing Department
Human Development and Family Studies
Non Technical Summary
Significance: The development of mathematical ability is critical for success in academic and career domains. Unfortunately, many children struggle to develop these skills and these deficits are evident as early as preschool. Substantial efforts have been made to enhance children's academic success through school-based programs, yet far less work has focused on supporting mathematics learning in the home. This is despite evidence that the home environment is often children's first learning environment. Recent evidence suggests that parents rarely engage their children in mathematics activities in the home compared to approximately 75% of parents who report reading to their child at least once in a while. Parents also believe that engaging their children in literacy is more important than engaging their child in mathematics. Thus, embedding mathematical instruction into literacy activities may provide an opportunity to support children's learnings while capitalizing on existing activities in which parents and children already engage. However, prior to the successful dissemination of such an intervention process, there is a need to evaluate how this instruction can best be incorporated into storybooks and for which groups of children and parents such an intervention is most effective.Contribution: Through the proposed study, we will be able to identify how to effectively incorporate and enhance high-quality parent-child language interactions into storybook reading. We will also be able to evaluate which parent and child factors may moderate the effects of the intervention. Moreover, through the third goal, we will develop, evaluate, and implement a dissemination method that can easily be used to engage families in effective storybook reading.Benefits: There are a number of critical benefits to stakeholders and society that will be generated from these studies. First and foremost, this project will advance the development of home-based educational curricula through the evaluation and refinement of the storybooks. Second, the findings will directly benefit children and families by enhancing children's mathematics skills. The interactive reading experiences will also support high-quality parent-child engagement during shared reading. Third, these findings will provide the scientific foundation for subsequent research on enhancing educational storybook development and expansion of new storybooks to more complex mathematical activities. Fourth, the development of the "Book Parties" will enhance children's learning opportunities and methods and translate basic research findings into applied settings. Ultimately, having a well-educated population, particularly in mathematics, needs to start at early ages--the home environment, with parent-child interactions, is the ideal environment to support early learning even before children enter formal schooling. The current study provides a foundation for such efforts.
Animal Health Component
30%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
70%
Applied
30%
Developmental
(N/A)
Goals / Objectives
The overarching objective of this project is to advance the use of high-quality home-based mathematics curricular materials by developing, evaluating, and disseminating effective methods of early mathematics instruction for preschool-age children who are at-risk of later low mathematics achievement or who are DLLs (Spanish/English). This broad objective enhances young children's learning opportunities and will be developed through three goals:Examine how design features of the picture book such as embedding dialogic reading prompts into the picture books can enhance parent-child engagement during storybook reading.Identify parent and child characteristics, such as parent education, child abilities, and language status that moderate the effects of an early math intervention delivered by parents.Based on the findings from the first two objectives, an Extension "Book Party" will be developed and evaluated to disseminate findings from the study, as well to disseminate the picture books to parents and educators around the state. As part of this objective, parents will also complete a survey on how they select books for their children and features/characteristics of books drive their decision-making process. This information will be used to enhance dissemination and training components and provide actionable research data for the future design of similar efforts.
Project Methods
The data for goals 1 and 2 will be a secondary data analysis of an ongoing research project. Data for this study were collected as part of another project where we developed, piloted, and evaluated a parent-child math intervention using picture books. During the first year of the project, our research team developed three picture books with embedded math content in the story line and the pictures. We also developed dialogic reading (DR) prompts (i.e. high-quality questions parents can use to enhance reading interactions with their child) that are embedded on each page. In the second year, we piloted the intervention with parents to obtain feedback on the books and intervention prior to implementation. During this process, we collected video-observations of parents reading to their children. Currently (the third year of this project), we are in the middle of completing a randomized control trial on the effects of the intervention. The central goal of the funded project is to evaluate the main effects of this intervention; however, we are also collecting parent report and parent-child interaction data to understand the factors that may affect intervention success and could be used in the future to improve instructional delivery and better support children who are at-risk for later difficulties. All components of this Hatch proposal are beyond the scope of the original study.Goal 1 Key Question: Does inclusion of DR prompts enhance parents' use of spontaneous prompts during parent-child reading and does this differ by language status?Participants: Participants include 28 parent-child dyads. Half of the participants were Spanish-English DLLs. Children were 38-74 months old, 16 female, and 32% of parents had less than a college degree.Method: Parent-child dyads were videotaped reading two storybooks. One storybook included DR prompts on each page of the book and the other storybook included no prompts. Recordings of the reading sessions will be transcribed and coded by trained research assistants to code for parent and child use of spontaneous questions beyond the embedded prompts, conversational turns, and types of questions.Analyses: A 2 (prompts: DR prompts, no prompts) x 2 (DLL status: DLL, not DLL) ANOVA will be used to evaluate the effects of prompt inclusion on spontaneous questions asked by parents and children by DLL status, as well as conversational turns. The findings from these analyses will enable us to determine how the embedding of DR prompts can enhance the parent-child storybook reading experience.Goal 2Key Question: Do parent or child characteristics moderate the effects of a storybook reading intervention. Specific primary moderators of interest include: child ability, socio-economic status, and language status as these factors have been found to be moderators of children's academic success in other work.Participants: Participants will include approximately 80 monolingual English speakers and 80 DLLs (Spanish/English). Children will be 3 to 5 years old and not currently in kindergarten. Parents will have a range of educational background, but be predominantly from families with less than a 4-year college degree. As long as parents reported that they were able to read, they were allowed to participate in the study.Method: Parents are currently being recruited from the community through local community centers, preschools, churches, and public family events. Participants meet with research project staff three times (pretest, posttest, and delayed posttest). At the first visit, parents complete an extensive interview where they are asked about their demographic background, parent-child home numeracy environment interactions, math anxiety, and other family engagement questions. Children are pretested on their math, language, and self-regulation skills. During the first visit, parents are then randomly assigned to one of two conditions: math storybook intervention or active control group. The two conditions follow a similar process with the primary differences between conditions being the storybooks parents read to their children. The math storybook intervention uses three storybooks with embedded math concepts. The active control condition uses three storybooks without embedded math concepts. Parents in both conditions were trained on how to use the books with their children through a brief training video. Each book has three embedded prompts per page. Parents were instructed on how to use one specific prompt per page for each reading of the book and build off the responses provided by their child. Over the next four weeks, they were asked to read the books to their children three times per week. Parents audio recorded each of the reading sessions in which they and their child engaged to enable us to measure adherence to training protocols. After four weeks, parents and children came back to the lab to complete a posttest interview that includes the same survey questions and children were post-tested on the same measures as at pretest. Finally, 8 weeks after the posttest, parents and children were brought back again to complete the same measures a third time.Analyses: Regression analyses that include interactions between intervention condition and key moderators will be conducted to examine which parent and child characteristics affect the success of the intervention. The findings from these analyses will enable us to determine what factors best predict intervention success so that we can tailor dissemination efforts to those who would benefit the most. If there are subgroups for whom the intervention was not effective, particularly for groups where children may be at risk for later mathematics difficulties (e.g., children with initially low mathematics skills, children from families with low-income/education), we will work to identify barriers to their success with the intervention by examining the open-ended feedback they provide during their final visit sessions.Goal 3Key Goal: Develop, conduct, and evaluate a "Book Party" family event where the books will be disseminated to parents and they will be trained on how to use the books. The event will be developed in collaboration with Purdue Extension. Extension educators will be trained on delivery of the event so that it can be conducted around the state. As part of this event, we will also conduct surveys with parents to identify factors that cause them to select books for their children. This will enable us to modify the current books, as well as future books, to enhance their uptake by parents.Participants: Based on results from Goal 2, we will target families who will most benefit from using the storybooks with their children. Our goal is to disseminate the books to over 200 families. The types of families to be recruited for the "Book Parties" will be based on the families who are most at-risk for later math difficulties for whom the intervention was most effective (as identified in Goal 2 moderator analyses).Methods: We will collaborate with Purdue Extension to develop the "Book Party" event and create a structure that can be replicated by others who wish to host similar events. The event will consist of training materials/videos for parents to view that will support their use of these books and a more general training on effective use of storybooks and mathematics activities to support children's learning. We will also develop a survey for parents to complete related to their children's book selection preferences. Our research team will host the initial "Book Parties" and provide the opportunity for Extension Educators to observe and participate. The Extension Educators will then be able to conduct the "Book Parties" in their own counties.Analyses: The primary analyses for this goal will involve descriptive and qualitative data on parent experiences and preferences so we can redesign and target dissemination of our books based upon parent feedback.