Families & the Community Report Roundup

Parent Involvement

By Sarah D. Sparks — December 08, 2015 1 min read
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Watching and playing with educational media with children can help boost low-income parents’ confidence and strategies to support their children’s learning, according to a new study of a program in the federal Ready to Learn Initiative.

Researchers from Education Development Center and SRI Education randomly assigned 200 low-income preschool children and their families to either continue their regular behavior or to use home activity materials including a tablet and apps related to a PBS show, “PEG+CAT,” for 12 weeks.

They found participating families reported more joint play and said they used problem-solving strategies discussed in the show. The parents said they felt significantly more confident in supporting their children’s math learning, and children’s knowledge of ordinal numbers, spatial relationships, and three-dimensional shapes increased more than it did for control group children.

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A version of this article appeared in the December 09, 2015 edition of Education Week as Parent Involvement

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