Students with stronger reading and math skills tend to perform better in school and earn higher incomes in adulthood. It is concerning, then, that children from low-income backgrounds enter school with weaker skills, on average, than their higher-income peers. Researchers theorize that a key driver of these early gaps is differences in parental engagement, with lower-income parents less frequently observed to engage with their children.
Motivated by these disparities, the papers summarized here examine interventions designed to enhance parental engagement. In Boosting Young Children’s Math Skill with Technology in the Home Environment, the authors provide digital apps and analog math materials to preschool aged children from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds and test the effect on children’s math skills; in A Digital Library for Parent-Child Shared Reading Improves Literacy Skills for Young Disadvantaged Children, the authors similarly test the effect of providing a digital library for parent-child shared reading on the literacy skills of low-income children; and in Priming Parental Identity: Evidence from Experimental Data, the authors use identity priming to encourage greater involvement in their children’s learning.
Boosting Young Children’s Math Skill with Technology in the Home Environment
In the United States, tailored programs designed to boost child math skills range from light-touch approaches (such as ones that send tips by text to parents about child development) to more complex and targeted approaches that train practitioners to visit and coach parents in their homes. Few parent interventions designed to boost children’s math skills have been experimentally evaluated in large and diverse samples.
In this experiment, the authors recruited families from 35 preschools throughout the City of Chicago to participate in About Time, a six-month randomized control trial (RCT): a study design where participants are randomly assigned to either a treatment group or a control group to objectively measure the effects of an intervention aimed at boosting parent-child engagement in math learning. The authors randomly assigned participants to one of three groups: a control group, a treatment group receiving a digital tablet with high-quality math apps, and another treatment group receiving equally high-quality analog math materials.
The authors assessed children’s math skills at the outset of the intervention as well as after six months. They also collected a self-reported measure of parental time spent on math engagement, along with survey measures of parents’ attitudes and beliefs. The authors compared these data across their three experimental groups, and found the following:
- In two-parent households, children who received math apps improved their math skills by 0.23 standard deviations compared to the control group. Providing analog math materials did not improve children’s math skills.
- The authors theorize that math apps were particularly effective in two-parent households because these environments may provide more support for learning, amplifying the benefits of parental engagement (consistent with Cunha and Heckman, 2007).
Providing math learning apps to families can be an effective way to moderately improve preschool-aged children’s math skills. These findings support efforts to expand at-home use of high-quality math apps, particularly as educational technology remains in the early stages of adoption in home environments. Increasing access to such tools could help enhance early math development and narrow achievement gaps before children enter school.
A Digital Library for Parent-Child Shared Reading Improves Literacy Skills for Young Disadvantaged Children
On any given day, 29% of college-educated mothers report reading to their children, compared to only 12% of mothers with a high school diploma and 7% of mothers with less than a high school education. This education-based gap in reading is the largest among early childhood investment activities linked to cognitive skill development.
To examine ways to address this disparity, the authors conducted an RCT with 300 low-income families in Chicago. The study tested whether access to a digital library could increase reading frequency and improve child literacy outcomes. The intervention lasted 11 months, with families randomly assigned to one of four groups, detailed below.
The authors measured children’s literacy skills before and after their intervention. They compare between their four experimental groups, and find the following:
- Access to the digital library alone led to a significant improvement of 0.29 standard deviations in children’s literacy skills compared to families who did not receive it.
- The behavioral messages offered no additional benefit beyond the library itself.
This experiment demonstrates the potential of technology to improve the literacy skills of low-income children. Digital libraries offer several advantages over large-scale programs that provide physical books to young children. A digital library can provide access to a significantly larger and more diverse collection of books, which can be updated and adjusted as children grow, offering greater flexibility and scalability.
Priming Parental Identity: Evidence from Experimental Data
Parents whose parental identities are stronger—i.e., those who place a greater emphasis on their roles as parents as opposed to other roles in their lives—tend to invest more in their children’s development. In the final paper in this trio, the authors examine whether priming parental identity affects parents’ real-world decisions.
The authors conduct two experiments using existing samples of Chicago parents who had previously received digital gift cards as compensation for participating in past studies. In each experiment, parents are randomly assigned to either a treatment or control group and receive weekly text messages for four weeks encouraging gift card redemption.
In both experiments, the treatment messages appeal to parental identity by encouraging parents to redeem the gift card to buy something for their children. The control group messages vary between the two experiments: In Experiment 1, the control group receives a generic reminder to redeem their gift card, while in Experiment 2, the control group message is designed to prime self-identity, encouraging parents to use the gift card for themselves. The authors then compare gift card redemption rates across the experimental groups and find the following:
- A text message highlighting what parents could purchase for their children with the gift card significantly increased the redemption rate by 45% compared to a generic reminder to redeem the gift card. The same prompt increased the redemption rate by 39% compared to a message encouraging parents to think about what they could buy for themselves.
- Parents in the treatment group who received parental identity messages redeemed their gift cards at different stores compared to parents in the control group, suggesting that the parental identity message may have influence parents’ shopping decisions. (The authors caution, however, that since they lack data on the specific items purchased in these stores, they cannot directly show that parents who received parental identity messages were more likely to buy products for their children.)
By demonstrating that parental identity can be effectively primed through low-cost messaging, this research contributes to a growing body of literature on identity and behavioral economics. These results hold promise for designing scalable interventions to encourage behaviors that promote child well-being, such as parental engagement, healthcare utilization, or savings for education. Future research could explore how identity priming interacts with other contextual factors, such as socioeconomic status or cultural norms, to better understand its potential applications across diverse settings. Additionally, studying the long-term effects of identity-based interventions would offer insights into whether the observed behavioral changes persist over time.