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.
