Closing Early Math Gaps by Parental Education with Technology at Home

Early math skills predict later achievement, and caregiver engagement is central to early skill development. We conducted a six-month experiment (About TIME) with 459 Chicago families of preschoolers (ages 3–5) spanning the socioeconomic spectrum. Families were randomized into: a control group that received a coloring book unrelated to math, a treatment group that received a digital tablet with math apps, and a treatment group that received analog math learning materials. On average, neither type of math material significantly increased children’s math skills. Pre-registered heterogeneity analyses by parental education, household income, and baseline skills show that children of non-BA parents assigned to the math app group gained 0.17 SD (about five national percentile points), while their BA-parent counterparts showed no gains, closing roughly one-third of the initial education-based skill gap. We found no significant effects in the income-based or baseline-skill subgroups. Benchmarking to our prior MPACT study (Mayer et al., 2023), we restrict About TIME to children from publicly subsidized preschools (MPACT’s recruitment source) and detect a math app effect of 0.16 SD, closely matching MPACT’s math app effect of 0.20 SD. These findings demonstrate a robust, replicable benefit of providing math apps to disadvantaged families of preschoolers and suggest that at-home technology may help reduce early math skill gaps.