Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Economically disadvantaged parents spend less time and especially less time in educational activities with their children compared to more advantaged children. Low parental time in enriching activities has adverse consequences on children’s future and educational success. Therefore, understanding the barriers that less educated parents face and ways to overcome them is important.

In an economic model of human capital, parents with present bias overvalue the current cost of investing on their children and undervalue the future benefits; as a result, they underinvest. Similarly, parents with a fixed mindset believe that their investments are unproductive and thus underinvest as well. An intervention that overcomes present bias increases parental time investment and child’s math skills, with this effect being larger for highly present-oriented parents. An intervention aimed at changing parental beliefs from a fixed to growth mindset is similarly expected to increase parental time investment and child’s skills.

To test these hypotheses, we designed a 12-week randomized control trial to reach approximately 1500 parents of preschool-age children attending 25-30 Head Start Centers in the City of Chicago. Randomization is at the individual child level and the intervention is conducted in Spanish and English. The demographics of our sample are broadly similar to the U.S. Head Start population with the exception that our sample has a far larger share of Hispanic families.

The experiment had four treatment arms in addition to a (C) control group: (T1) provision of a game board and card deck (the M-Kit) illustrating everyday math activities parents could do with their child; (T2) the M-Kit plus text messages (four per week) designed to overcome parents’ present bias; (T3) the M-Kit plus text messages (four per week) designed to increase parents’ beliefs that children’s math skills are malleable (versus fixed); (T4) provision directly to the child of an electronic tablet loaded with educational apps covering the same content as the M-Kit (but no other materials and no text messages to parents). The math activities and apps focus on five specific skill areas within the numeracy domain: number recognition, counting, comparing size and quantity, adding and subtracting, and patterns.

The data collection is being conducted in three rounds of approximately equal size. We have data from parent surveys, teacher surveys, parents’ scores on a time-preference task, and children’s math test skills. The child assessments are the Woodcock Johnson IV Applied Problems (WJ-IV) and the Preschool Early Numeracy Scales (PENS) developed by Purpura and Lonigan (2015). All measures are available at baseline and immediately following the 12-week intervention.

Our preliminary analysis of the first round of data suggests that treatment effects are positive for the growth mindset group, larger for the present bias group, and negative for the tablet group. These effects, however, are not significant due to small sample size. We expect to have more precise estimates when outcomes of the second round are available in May.