A Parent-Child Math Engagement Program to Enhance Learning and Decrease Math Anxiety

Math FUNdations is both a text-based and app-based intervention that seeks to help parents engage in math learning with their elementary school children (grades 3 and 4), by addressing barriers for effective parental engagement. The underlying theory of action for Math FUNdations is to increase students’ math achievement via three main mechanisms together: (1) increase the quality of parental engagement in math at home, by decreasing parental and students’ math anxiety; (2) decrease parents’ misbeliefs about the math learning standards that need to be met by their children; and (3) increase the amount of parental engagement in math at home.

Text-based: Every week, we will send parents in the treatment group three texts suggesting simple, fun math activities they can do with their child at home, helping them convey positive emotions around math and informing them of the learning milestones in math that their children need to know by the end of fourth grade. Specifically,
• The ENCOURAGE texts will be sent on Mondays. These texts are designed to set a positive tone for interactions around math. The goal of these texts is to help parents be aware of their positive and negative emotions while interacting around math and, consequently, understand how they could convey their math anxiety to their children. The texts will provide tips to parents about how to minimize their math-anxiety-related behaviors.
• The ELEVATE texts will be sent on Wednesdays. These texts aim to inform parents, in a simple language, about what their children should know by the end of fourth grade. These texts will provide parents with a brief version of a Texas math standard (Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills [TEKS]). In addition, these texts will contain a link to the extended version of the learning standard.
• The ENGAGE texts will be sent on Fridays. These texts aim to provide parents with a simple (easy-to-achieve), fun math activity for helping their children. Parents will also receive a link to a step-by-step guide to the activity. Each of these at-home activities is matched to a 4th-grade standard based on Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS).

App-based: The text messages include a clickable link redirecting parents to a web app, which enhances math activities with images and dynamic content while enabling data collection after each activity. Parents can access the web app directly through any internet browser without the need to download an app. The link will be added to either the ELEVATE and/or ENGAGE texts.

Research Questions: This parent-child math engagement program aims to address the following interrelated research questions: (1) What are the effects of MFUN on 3rd and 4th grade students’ math outcomes (grades and test scores)?, (2) What are the effects of MFUN on the reported levels of parental math anxiety, parental self-efficacy for supporting their child in math, and students’ feelings about math (as perceived by parents via the end of the year survey to parents, prompted text replies, and qualitative interviews)?, (3) What are the “spillover” or “crowding out” effects of MFUN on other subject areas?, (4) How much of the effects of MFUN on math achievement is due to explicitly guiding parents on how to interact around math aside from the academic content?, and lastly, (5) For those students whose parents received the summer texts did MFUN lead to less of a summer learning loss for those students?

2024-09-23

2025-08-31

Math and ELA (reading and writing) course grades, math and ELA (reading and writing) test scores, parent survey, and semi-structured interviews.

(1) Data from the texting platform will be used to examine opt-out rates and prompted text replies. (2) Open-ended text responses from the parent survey will be used to examine parent perceptions of the program. (3) Other student outcomes: ELA course grades and ELA reading/writing test scores.

Randomization: To assign parents to one of the texting groups, we will employ a multi-site person-level randomized controlled trial design, blocking on, for example, elementary school, grade level, and texting language (English or Spanish).

Experimental Groups: Parents can choose to receive texts in English or Spanish. All content is translated to ensure consistency. For the 2024-25 school year, parents will be randomly assigned to two groups: the control group, receiving one non-math-related text every two weeks, and the treatment group, receiving three MFUN texts per week for 24 weeks.

Regarding 3rd-grade parent re-enrollees from the 2023-24 school year (RCT ID: AEARCTR-0010483), whose children will be in 4th grade in 2024-25, those parents will be re-randomized to either the control or treatment group.

For the summer 2025 supplemental study, we intend to continue texting a random sample of parents from the 2024-25 study. For the summer study, half of the parents will receive the treatment texts and half will receive the control texts. Parents can opt out at any time by replying “Stop” or “Cancel.”

Not available

Randomization is done in office by computer

Individual parents

No

School district #1: 1300 parents
School district #2: 4200 parents

School district #1: 1300 parents School district #2: 4200 parents

School district #1: 1300 parents (treatment: 650; control: 650)
School district #2: 4200 parents (treatment: 2100; control: 2100)

A sample size calculation conducted using G*Power 3.1 indicated that a sample of 579 students in grades 3 and 4 (i.e., 290 per experimental group) was required to allow for the detection of a difference of 0.19 SD on students' outcomes, requiring an alpha of 0.05, a power of 0.80, and using the difference between two independent means.